Faces: a neural Rosetta stone - Doris Tsao

Faces: a neural Rosetta stone

Doris Tsao, Caltech

T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience Leadership Chair Investigator
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Director, T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience

Abstract

Objects constitute the fundamental currency of the brain: they are things that we perceive, remember, and think about.  One of the most important objects for a primate is a face. Research on the macaque face patch system in recent years has given us a remarkable window into the detailed processes underlying object recognition. I will discuss recent findings from our lab elucidating the code for facial identity used by cells in face patches and how this code generalizes in other parts of IT cortex responsible for coding non-face objects. I will then discuss how the IT code is used by downstream areas, as well as how the brain computes what constitutes an object in the first place.