Organization and functions of cells responsive to faces in the temporal cortex

Abstract

Cells selectively responsive to the face have been found in several visual sub-areas of temporal cortex in the macaque brain. These include the lateral and ventral surfaces of inferior temporal cortex and the upper bank, lower bank and fundus of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). Cells in the different regions may contribute in different ways to the processing of the facial image. Within the upper bank of the STS different populations of cells are selective for different views of the face and head. These cells occur in functionally discrete patches (3-5 mm across) within the STS cortex. Studies of output connections from the STS also reveal a modular anatomical organization of repeating 3-5 mm patches connected to the parietal cortex, an area thought to be involved in spatial awareness and in the control of attention. The properties of some cells suggest a role in the discrimination of heads from other objects, and in the recognition of familiar individuals. The selectivity for view suggests that the neural operations underlying face or head recognition rely on parallel analyses of different characteristic views of the head, the outputs of these view-specific analyses being subsequently combined to support view-independent (object-centred) recognition. An alternative functional interpretation of the sensitivity to head view is that the cells enable an analysis of 'social attention', i.e. they signal where other individuals are directing their attention. A cell maximally responsive to the left profile thus provides a signal that the attention (of another individual) is directed to the observer's left. Such information is useful for analysing social interactions between other individuals.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Deep learning in neural networks: An overview

“…While the visual cortex of BNNs may use quite different learning algorithms, its objective function to be minimised may be quite similar to the one of visual ANNs. In fact, results obtained with relatively deep artificial DBNs (Lee et al, 2007b) and CNNs (Yamins et al, 2013) seem compatible with insights about the visual pathway in the primate cerebral cortex, which has been studied for many decades (e.g., Hubel and Wiesel, 1968;Perrett et al, 1982;Desimone et al, 1984;Felleman and Van Essen, 1991;Perrett et al, 1992;Kobatake and Tanaka, 1994;Logothetis et al, 1995;Bichot et al, 2005;Hung et al, 2005;Lennie and Movshon, 2005;Connor et al, 2007;Kriegeskorte et al, 2008;DiCarlo et al, 2012); compare a computer vision-oriented survey (Kruger et al, 2013).…”

Processing social aspects of human gaze: A combined fMRI-DTI study

“…Abundant evidence suggests that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is critical for gaze processing, including neurophysiological data in non-human primates (Campbell et al, 1990;Hasselmo et al, 1989;Perrett et al, 1992Perrett et al, , 1985, lesion studies (Akiyama et al, 2006;Campbell et al, 1990), and neuroimaging experiments (Conty et al, 2007;Hoffman and Haxby, 2000;Pelphrey et al, 2005Pelphrey et al, , 2003bPuce et al, 1998). The right pSTS has been shown to contain overlapping representations for perception of biological movement, moral judgment and theory of mind (Bahnemann et al, 2010) and appears to be particularly sensitive to goals and intentions conveyed by gaze in social (Bristow et al, 2007;Pelphrey et al, 2004b) and nonsocial (Mosconi et al, 2005;Pelphrey et al, 2004aPelphrey et al, , 2003b paradigms.…”

Brain activation during eye gaze discrimination in stable schizophrenia

“…Lesion and functional brain studies in humans and primates support the role of the fusiform gyrus in face processing (Allison et al 1994, Clark et al 1996, Kanwisher et al 1997. Gaze detection consistently involves areas of the superior temporal sulcus (Perrett et al 1992, Campbell et al 1999, Hoffman and Haxby 2000, Pelphrey et al 2004 and prefrontal lobe (Wicker et al 1998), that are already implicated in schizophrenia, based on volumetric and functional studies (McCarley et al 1993, Gur and Pearlson 1993, Zipursky et al 1994. Rosse et al (1994) reported that persons with schizophrenia, particularly those with paranoia, misidentified faces with averted gaze as making eye contact.…”