Single-Cell Responses to Face Adaptation in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

We used a face adaptation paradigm to bias the perception of ambiguous images of faces and study how single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) respond to the same images eliciting different percepts. The ambiguous images were morphs between the faces of two familiar individuals, chosen because at least one MTL neuron responded selectively to one but not to the other face. We found that the firing of MTL neurons closely followed the subjects’ perceptual decisions—i.e., recognizing one person or the other. In most cases, the response to the ambiguous images was similar to the one obtained when showing the pictures without morphing. Altogether, these results show that many neurons in the medial temporal lobe signal the subjects’ perceptual decisions rather than the visual features of the stimulus.