Distributed Neural Systems for Face Perception

Face perception plays a central role in social communication and is, arguably, one of the most sophisticated visual perceptual skills in humans. Consequently, face perception has been the subject of intensive investigation and theorizing in both visual and social neuroscience. The organization of neural systems for face perception has stimulated intense debate. Much of this debate has focused on models that posit the existence of a module that is specialized for face perception versus models that propose that face perception is mediated by distributed processing. In our work, we have proposed that face perception is mediated by distributed systems, both in terms of the involvement of multiple brain areas and in terms of locally distributed population codes within these areas. Specifically, we proposed a model for the distributed neural system for face perception that has a Core System of visual extrastriate areas for visual analysis of faces and an Extended System that consists of additional neural systems that work in concert with the Core System to extract various types of information from faces. We also have shown that in visual extrastriate cortices, information that distinguishes faces from other categories of animate and inanimate objects is not restricted to regions that respond maximally to faces, i.e. the fusiform and occipital face areas.