Neural representations of perceptual and semantic identities of individuals in the anterior ventral inferior temporal cortex of monkeys

摘要

Since the discovery of "face cells" in the early 1980s, single-cell recording experiments in nonhuman primates have made great contributions toward elucidation of the neural mechanisms underlying face perception and recognition. In this article, I review the recent progress in face cell studies, including recent research into the face patches scattered around the anterior temporal cortical areas of monkeys. In particular, I focused on the neural representations of individual identity in these areas. Several groups have shown that the population of face cells in the anterior ventral inferior temporal cortex of monkeys represents the perceptual identity of faces in a view-invariant manner. In this context, I also summarized our own study showing that the face-cell population in the anterior ventral inferior temporal cortex of monkeys, which represents the perceptual identity of the faces, can also represent the semantic identity of the individuals; the learned paired associations between an abstract picture and a particular facial identity were also represented in the anterior ventral IT cortex.