Cogn Neuropsychol. 2000 Feb 1;17(1):125-42. doi: 10.1080/026432900380535.
In monkeys, a number of different neocortical as well as limbic structures have cell populations that respond preferentially to face stimuli. Face selectivity is also differentiated within itself: Cells in the inferior temporal and prefrontal cortex tend to respond to facial identity, others in the upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus to gaze directions, and yet another population in the amygdala to facial expression. The great majority of these cells are sensitive to the entire configuration of a face. Changing the spatial arrangement of the facial features greatly diminishes the neurons' response. It would appear, then, that an entire neural network for faces exists which contains units highly selective to complex configurations and that respond to different aspects of the object "face." Given the vital importance of face recognition in primates, this may not come as a surprise. But are faces the only objects represented in this way? Behavioural work in humans suggests that nonface objects may be processed like faces if subjects are required to discriminate between visually similar exemplars and acquire sufficient expertise in doing so. Recent neuroimaging studies in humans indicate that level of categorisation and expertise interact to produce the specialisation for faces in the middle fusiform gyrus. Here we discuss some new evidence in the monkey suggesting that any arbitrary homogeneous class of artificial objects-which the animal has to individually learn, remember, and recognise again and again from among a large number of distractors sharing a number of common features with the target-can induce configurational selectivity in the response of neurons in the visual system. For all of the animals tested, the neurons from which we recorded were located in the anterior inferotemporal cortex. However, as we have only recorded from the posterior and anterior ventrolateral temporal lobe, other cells with a similar selectivity for the same objects may also exist in areas of the medial temporal lobe or in the limbic structures of the same "expert" monkeys. It seems that the encoding scheme used for faces may also be employed for other classes with similar properties. Thus, regarding their neural encoding, faces are not "special" but rather the "default special" class in the primate recognition system.
在猴子中，许多不同的新皮质和边缘结构都有细胞群体，这些细胞群体对脸部刺激有优先反应。脸部选择性本身也有所区分：下颞叶和前额叶皮层中的细胞倾向于对脸部身份做出反应，上颞叶沟的上部的其他细胞则对注视方向做出反应，杏仁核中的另一个细胞群体则对脸部表情做出反应。这些细胞中的绝大多数都对整个脸部结构敏感。改变面部特征的空间排列会大大降低神经元的反应。那么，似乎存在一个完整的脸部神经网络，其中包含对复杂结构高度选择性的单元，并且对物体“脸部”的不同方面做出反应。鉴于脸部识别在灵长类动物中的重要性，这可能并不奇怪。但是，脸部是唯一以这种方式表示的物体吗？人类的行为研究表明，如果要求受试者在视觉相似的样本之间进行区分并在这方面获得足够的专业知识，那么非脸部物体也可以像脸部一样进行处理。最近人类的神经影像学研究表明，分类水平和专业知识的相互作用会导致中梭状回对脸部的专门化。在这里，我们讨论了一些在猴子中获得的新证据，这些证据表明，任何任意的同质的人工物体类别——动物必须从大量具有与目标物体共享许多共同特征的分心物中一遍又一遍地单独学习、记忆和识别——都可以在视觉系统的神经元反应中引起结构选择性。对于所有测试的动物，我们记录的神经元都位于前下颞叶皮层。然而，由于我们只记录了后外侧颞叶和前外侧颞叶，因此可能也存在具有类似选择对象的其他细胞，这些细胞位于内侧颞叶或同一“专家”猴子的边缘结构中。似乎用于脸部的编码方案也可用于具有类似属性的其他类别。因此，就其神经编码而言，脸部不是“特殊的”，而是灵长类识别系统中的“默认特殊”类别。
