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The neural code for ‘face cells’ is not face specific

View ORCID ProfileKasper Vinken, View ORCID ProfileJacob S. Prince, View ORCID ProfileTalia Konkle, View ORCID ProfileMargaret Livingstone
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.06.483186
Kasper Vinken
1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115
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  • For correspondence: kasper_vinken@hms.harvard.edu
Jacob S. Prince
2Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02478
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Talia Konkle
2Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02478
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Margaret Livingstone
1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115
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1 Abstract

‘Face cells’ are visual neurons that respond more to faces than other objects. Clustered together in inferotemporal cortex, they are thought to carry out face processing specifically and are thus 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-faces that were predictive of the degree of face selectivity and provided information on face-cell tuning that could not be characterized with 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 object classification rather than face identification. These findings contradict the long-standing assumption that face cells owe their category selectivity to face-specific features, instead providing evidence for the notion that category-selective neurons are best understood as tuning directions in an integrated, domain-general object space.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Major text revision and inclusion of additional models and analyses

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted December 07, 2022.
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The neural code for ‘face cells’ is not face specific
Kasper Vinken, Jacob S. Prince, Talia Konkle, Margaret Livingstone
bioRxiv 2022.03.06.483186; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.06.483186
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The neural code for ‘face cells’ is not face specific
Kasper Vinken, Jacob S. Prince, Talia Konkle, Margaret Livingstone
bioRxiv 2022.03.06.483186; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.06.483186

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