Open AccessShared neural codes for visual and semantic information about familiar faces in a common representational space
Author(s) -
Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello,
James V. Haxby,
M. Ida Gobbini
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.011
H-Index - 771
eISSN - 1091-6490
pISSN - 0027-8424
DOI - 10.1073/pnas.2110474118
Subject(s) - face perception , perception , face (sociological concept) , psychology , functional magnetic resonance imaging , cognitive psychology , visual perception , subject (documents) , encoding (memory) , computer science , communication , linguistics , neuroscience , philosophy , library science
Processes evoked by seeing a personally familiar face encompass recognition of visual appearance and activation of social and person knowledge. Whereas visual appearance is the same for all viewers, social and person knowledge may be more idiosyncratic. Using between-subject multivariate decoding of hyperaligned functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we investigated whether representations of personally familiar faces in different parts of the distributed neural system for face perception are shared across individuals who know the same people. We found that the identities of both personally familiar and merely visually familiar faces were decoded accurately across brains in the core system for visual processing, but only the identities of personally familiar faces could be decoded across brains in the extended system for processing nonvisual information associated with faces. Our results show that personal interactions with the same individuals lead to shared neural representations of both the seen and unseen features that distinguish their identities.