Neural Code Behind Recognition Of Familiar Faces

Specific and distinct information encoded in a neural code is shared across brains to help recognize familiar faces as per a study at Dartmouth College, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the keys to social interaction is the ability to recognize familiar faces. But the brain mechanism behind this process has long been a question.

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‘Specific neural code that is shared across brains may help recognize familiar faces.’

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“Within visual processing areas, we found that information about personally familiar and visually familiar faces is shared across the brains of people who have the same friends and acquaintances. The surprising part of our findings was that the shared information about personally familiar faces also extends to areas that are non-visual and important for social processing, suggesting that there is shared social information across brains,” says first author Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Guarini ’18, who conducted this research as a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and is now a neuroscience post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Visual Processing

The team explored this using a method called hyperalignment, where representational space is created for the understanding of similar brain activity between participants. Data obtained from three fMRI tasks with 14 graduate students who had known each other for at least two years, were utilized.

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The participants were given three tasks to test visual familiarity and further using machine learning, they were able to predict the results.

It was found that the identity of visually familiar and personally familiar faces was decoded with accuracy across the brain in areas that are mostly involved in the visual processing of faces. Outside of the visual areas, however, there was not a lot of decoding.

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Areas of Brain

High decoding accuracy was found in four other areas outside of the visual system: the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (social processing – processing other people’s intentions and traits), the precuneus (active on processing familiar faces), the insula (emotional processing), and the temporal parietal junction (social cognition and “theory of the mind”).

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“It would have been quite possible that everybody has their own private code for what people are like but this is not the case. Our research shows that processing familiar faces really has to do with general knowledge about people,” says co-author James Haxby, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth.

Source-Medindia