Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-8531, Japan.
J Neurosci. 2011 Jul 13;31(28):10371-9. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1114-11.2011.
Social communication in nonhuman primates and humans is strongly affected by facial information from other individuals. Many cortical and subcortical brain areas are known to be involved in processing facial information. However, how the neural representation of faces differs across different brain areas remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the reference frame for spatial frequency (SF) tuning of face-responsive neurons differs in the temporal visual cortex and amygdala in monkeys. Consistent with psychophysical properties for face recognition, temporal cortex neurons were tuned to image-based SFs (cycles/image) and showed viewing distance-invariant representation of face patterns. On the other hand, many amygdala neurons were influenced by retina-based SFs (cycles/degree), a characteristic that is useful for social distance computation. The two brain areas also differed in the luminance contrast sensitivity of face-responsive neurons; amygdala neurons sharply reduced their responses to low luminance contrast images, while temporal cortex neurons maintained the level of their responses. From these results, we conclude that different types of visual processing in the temporal visual cortex and the amygdala contribute to the construction of the neural representations of faces.
非人类灵长类动物和人类的社会交流受到来自其他个体的面部信息的强烈影响。许多皮质和皮质下脑区被认为参与了面部信息的处理。然而，不同脑区对面部信息的神经表示如何不同尚不清楚。在这里，我们证明了猴子的颞叶视觉皮层和杏仁核中，空间频率（SF）调谐的参考系因面孔反应神经元而不同。与面孔识别的心理物理特性一致，颞叶皮层神经元对基于图像的 SF（每幅图像的周期）进行调谐，并对面孔模式表现出与观察距离无关的表示。另一方面，许多杏仁核神经元受到基于视网膜的 SF（每度的周期）的影响，这一特征对于社交距离计算很有用。这两个脑区在面孔反应神经元的亮度对比敏感度上也存在差异；杏仁核神经元对低亮度对比度图像的反应急剧减少，而颞叶皮层神经元则保持其反应水平。根据这些结果，我们得出结论，颞叶视觉皮层和杏仁核中的不同类型的视觉处理有助于构建面孔的神经表示。
