Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea; Program of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
Neurosci Lett. 2019 Aug 24;708:134344. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2019.134344. Epub 2019 Jun 19.
The human faculty of distinguishing thousands of faces critically contributes to face identification and our social interactions. While prior studies have revealed the involvement of the fusiform face area (FFA) in the individuation processing of faces, there are also reports supporting that the responses of the FFA is flexible depending on tasks. Here, we investigated whether the specificity of neural responses in the FFA for individual faces depends on the need for individuation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that individual face images could be decoded from response patterns of the FFA when individuation was required for the task but not when only categorization according to a common feature such as race or gender was necessary. These results suggest that the specificity of neural responses for individual faces is flexible in the FFA, depending on the behavioral goal of face individuation.
人类区分数千张面孔的能力对人脸识别和社交互动至关重要。虽然之前的研究表明梭状回面孔区（FFA）参与了面孔的个体化处理，但也有报道称，FFA 的反应取决于任务的灵活性。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究了 FFA 中个体面孔的神经反应特异性是否取决于个体化的需要。我们发现，当任务需要个体化时，可以从 FFA 的反应模式中解码出个体面孔图像，但当仅根据种族或性别等共同特征进行分类时则不行。这些结果表明，FFA 中个体面孔的神经反应特异性是灵活的，取决于面孔个体化的行为目标。
