A study in rhesus monkeys of face-selective neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, a component of the brain's face recognition system, finds that the neurons first discriminate between faces and nonfaces and then recognize faces' emotional content and social category, such as gender and age; the researchers also report that the neurons are specialized for facial recognition and unaffected by auditory cues or learned reward values associated with faces.
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Article #18-06165: "Face cells in orbitofrontal cortex represent social categories," by Elodie Barat, Sylvia Wirth, and Jean-René Duhamel.
MEDIA CONTACT: Sylvia Wirth, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, CNRS, Bron, FRANCE; tel: +33-437911232; e-mail: swirth@isc.cnrs.fr
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences