Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02478, USA.
Sci Adv. 2023 Sep;9(35):eadg1736. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adg1736. Epub 2023 Aug 30.
Face cells are neurons that respond more to faces than to non-face objects. They are found in clusters in the inferotemporal cortex, thought to process faces specifically, and, hence, studied using faces almost exclusively. Analyzing neural responses in and around macaque face patches to hundreds of objects, we found graded response profiles for non-face objects that predicted the degree of face selectivity and provided information on face-cell tuning beyond that from actual faces. This relationship between non-face and face responses was not predicted by color and simple shape properties but by information encoded in deep neural networks trained on general objects rather than face classification. These findings contradict the long-standing assumption that face versus non-face selectivity emerges from face-specific features and challenge the practice of focusing on only the most effective stimulus. They provide evidence instead that category-selective neurons are best understood by their tuning directions in a domain-general object space.
面孔细胞是对人脸比对非人脸物体反应更强烈的神经元。它们集中在颞下回皮层，被认为专门处理人脸，因此几乎只使用人脸来进行研究。我们分析了猕猴面孔区域及其周围的神经元对数百个物体的反应，发现非人脸物体的反应呈渐变模式，可以预测面孔选择性的程度，并提供了有关面孔细胞调谐的信息，超出了实际面孔的信息。这种非面孔和面孔反应之间的关系不能用颜色和简单形状特征来预测，而是可以用在一般物体而不是面孔分类上训练的深度神经网络编码的信息来预测。这些发现与长期以来的假设相矛盾，即面孔与非面孔的选择性源自于特定于面孔的特征，并挑战了只关注最有效刺激的做法。相反，它们提供了证据表明，通过在一般对象空间中的调谐方向，最佳地理解类别选择性神经元。
