Cortical Face-Selective Responses Emerge Early in Human Infancy

Abstract

Faces are a rich source of social information. How does the infant brain develop the ability to recognize faces and identify potential social partners? We collected functional magnetic neuroimaging (fMRI) data from 49 awake human infants (aged 2.5-9.7 months) while they watched movies of faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. Face-selective responses were observed not only in ventral temporal cortex (VTC) but also in superior temporal sulcus (STS), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Face responses were also observed (but not fully selective) in the amygdala and thalamus. We find no evidence that face-selective responses develop in visual perception regions (VTC) prior to higher order social perception (STS) or social evaluation (MPFC) regions. We suggest that face-selective responses may develop in parallel across multiple cortical regions. Infants’ brains could thus simultaneously process faces both as a privileged category of visual images, and as potential social partners.

Combining electrodermal activity analysis and dynamic causal modeling to investigate the visual-odor multimodal integration during face perception

“…In particular, recent literature confirmed crucial effective connectivity among these areas, thus confirming the connections described by models of the core system of face perception [25]. Furthermore, most recent advances in the literature confirmed the specialization of the areas involved in this system [92]. According to our results, the facial information processing appears to stop at the FFG stage for faces that generate a sympathetic response, since forward connections towards the MTG are inhibited while backward connections to the FFG are enhanced.…”

Evolution of reading and face circuits during the first three years of reading acquisition

“…Given those findings, it could have been thought that face circuitry (including face identification and articulatory movement perception) would have been fully in place prior to reading acquisition. However, many findings, including the present ones, conclusively show that the development of face responsivity in the fusiform gyrus is protracted: fMRI responses selective to faces are detectable in infants (Tzourio-Mazoyer et al, 2002; Deen et al, 2017; Kosakowski et al, 2021) and pre-schoolers (Cantlon et al, 2011), but they continue to develop with age throughout childhood and into adolescence (Golarai et al, 2007; Scherf et al, 2007; Grill-Spector et al, 2008; Peelen et al, 2009).…”

“…The spatial organization of category-specific responses is known to develop slowly during childhood and even adolescence. In infants, a rough medial-to-lateral partition is already observed during the first year of life, with medial responses to places and lateral responses to faces and tools, yet the activations to faces were initially reported to be indistinguishable from those to tools (Deen et al, 2017), but with improved MRI method, a recent study reported activation selective to faces relative to objects in infancy (Kosakowski et al, 2021). Later in childhood, we and others found that fusiform face responses are clearly present, for instance in kindergartners (Cantlon, Pinel, Dehaene, & Pelphrey, 2011; Dehaene-Lambertz et al, 2018), but continue to slowly grow until adolescence (Golarai et al, 2007; Scherf, Behrmann, Humphreys, & Luna, 2007; Grill-Spector, Golarai, & Gabrieli, 2008; Peelen, Glaser, Vuilleumier, & Eliez, 2009; Natu et al, 2016).…”

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one-month-old infants

“…Data were cleaved between consecutive timepoints having more than 2 degrees or 2 mm of frame-toframe displacement, creating subruns, each of which contained at least 48 consecutive low-motion (less than 2 degrees/mm of motion) volumes. These motion exclusion criteria are similar to previously reported thresholds [91][92][93]. All volumes included in a subrun were extracted from the original run data and combined to create a new Nifti file for each subrun.…”

“…Within each subrun, volumes with greater than 0.5 degrees/mm of motion between volumes were scrubbed. As in our previous research, if more than 3 consecutive images were scrubbed, there had to be at least 7 consecutive low-motion volumes following the scrubbed volume in order for those volumes to be included in the analysis [91,92]. Each subrun had to have at least 48 volumes after accounting for motion.…”