Three pioneers in face-perception research have won the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.

Nancy Kanwisher, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Winrich Freiwald, professor of neurosciences and behavior at Rockefeller University; and Doris Tsao, professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, will share the $1 million Kavli Prize for their discoveries of the regionsin both the human and monkey brainsresponsible for identifying and recognizing faces.

This is work thats very classic and very elegant, not only in face-processing and face-recognition work, but the impact its had on how we think about brain organization in general is huge, says Alexander Cohen, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who studies face recognition in autistic people.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awards the prize every two years.

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To get to the root of face processing, Kanwisher spent hours as a young researcher lying still in an MRI machine as images of faces and objects flashed before her. A spot in the bottom right of the cerebral cortex lit up when she and others looked at faces, according to functional MRI (fMRI) scans, she and her colleagues reported in a seminal 1997 paper. They called the region the fusiform face area.

This discovery offered some of the first concrete evidence that the brain specializes in sections, rather than working as a giant, adaptable generalist, Kanwisher says. This shows that for some mental functions, theres a very particular part of the brain that does just that and only that thing.

The discovery revolutionized how we thought about specialization of the brain, Cohen says.

Two other face-sensitive regionsthe occipital and superior temporal sulcus face areasprocess parts of the face, such as the eyes, nose and mouth, and changeable aspects, such as gaze direction, subsequent work showed.

But knowing that regions of the human brain selectively respond to a face cannot tell a researcher much about how or why this happens, Kanwisher says. Tsao and Freiwald built on Kanwishers findings by carrying out studies in macaque monkeys to answer questions that studies in people could not. They used fMRI to scan 10 of the animals while showing them pictures of human faces, macaque faces, hands, gadgets, fruits and vegetables, headless bodies and scrambled patterns.

The monkeys brains have six distinct face patches, thought to be analogous to the areas seen in people, Tsao and Freiwald reported in a 2008 study.

Individual cells in these face patch regions specialize in recognizing faces seen from different angleslooking up, down, tilted to the side, and in profile, for instanceaccording to electrophysiological recordings, suggesting these specialized modules work together across regions, the team discovered.

Specific neurons can even recognize the different components that go into forming a facefrom hair to pupils, Tsao and Freiwald found in additional work involving electrode recordings.

Thats when we got this picture that the face patches are really like this assembly line that are building this invariant representation of facial identity, Tsao says.

Two additional brain areas in macaques temporal lobe specifically respond to familiar faces and not unfamiliar ones, Freiwald and his colleagues later identified using fMRI.

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Tsao echoes her enthusiasm for the launchpad these findings have offered for future brain mapping. When we first started working on the face-patch system, people said its a total unicorn, Tsao says. That turned out to be completely wrong. It turns out that the face-patch system basically is a Rosetta Stone for all of the IT [inferior temporal] cortex. All of the IT cortex is organized in exactly the same way.

Understanding how we see faces can also be a tool for understanding more complex mental processes, such as memory and emotions, that are linked with social interactions, Freiwald says. Faces are the social stimulus for visual and social animals like us.

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2024 Kavli Prize awarded for research on face-selective brain areas - The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives