Neuronal mechanism of the encoding of socially familiar faces in the striatum tail

Abstract

Although we can quickly locate a familiar person even in a crowd, the underlying neuronal mechanism remains unclear. Recently, we found that the striatum tail (STRt), which is part of the basal ganglia, is sensitive to long-term reward history. Here, we show that long-term value-coding neurons are involved in the detection of socially familiar faces. Many STRt neurons respond to facial images, especially to those of socially familiar persons. Additionally, we found that these face-responsive neurons also encode the stable values of many objects based on long-term reward experiences. Interestingly, the strength of neuronal modulation of social familiarity bias (familiar or unfamiliar) and object value bias (high-valued or low-valued) were positively correlated. These results suggest that both social familiarity and stable object-value information are mediated by a common neuronal mechanism. This mechanism may contribute to the rapid detection of familiar faces in real-world contexts.TeaserThe common mechanism mediating social familiarity and stable object-value information may contribute to rapid detection of familiar faces.

Rapid integration of face detection and task set in visually guided reaching

“…We presume such a top-down influence in the setting of SC activity comes from ample projections from the frontal cortex, which is involved in the implementation and selection of task sets (Cameron et al, 2015; Johnston & Everling, 2006; Postle, 2005; Wallis et al, 2001) and basal ganglia, which codes for task urgency and reward expectation (Hikosaka et al, 2000; Kawagoe et al, 1998; Thura & Cisek, 2017; Yasuda & Hikosaka, 2015). It is unlikely that these areas produce the bottom-up effect since EVR latencies are shorter than visual response and face detection latencies in the primate prefrontal cortex (Blanke et al, 1999; Heekeren et al, 2006) and basal ganglia (Kunimatsu et al, 2023).…”