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Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus
Faces are salient social stimuli that attract a stereotypical pattern of eye movement. The human amygdala and hippocampus are involved in various aspects of face processing; however, it remains unclear how they encode the content of fixations when viewing faces. To answer this question, we employed...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8671411/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34907323 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02917-1 |
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author | Cao, Runnan Li, Xin Brandmeir, Nicholas J. Wang, Shuo |
author_facet | Cao, Runnan Li, Xin Brandmeir, Nicholas J. Wang, Shuo |
author_sort | Cao, Runnan |
collection | PubMed |
description | Faces are salient social stimuli that attract a stereotypical pattern of eye movement. The human amygdala and hippocampus are involved in various aspects of face processing; however, it remains unclear how they encode the content of fixations when viewing faces. To answer this question, we employed single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking when participants viewed natural face stimuli. We found a class of neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus that encoded salient facial features such as the eyes and mouth. With a control experiment using non-face stimuli, we further showed that feature selectivity was specific to faces. We also found another population of neurons that differentiated saccades to the eyes vs. the mouth. Population decoding confirmed our results and further revealed the temporal dynamics of face feature coding. Interestingly, we found that the amygdala and hippocampus played different roles in encoding facial features. Lastly, we revealed two functional roles of feature-selective neurons: 1) they encoded the salient region for face recognition, and 2) they were related to perceived social trait judgments. Together, our results link eye movement with neural face processing and provide important mechanistic insights for human face perception. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8671411 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-86714112022-01-04 Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus Cao, Runnan Li, Xin Brandmeir, Nicholas J. Wang, Shuo Commun Biol Article Faces are salient social stimuli that attract a stereotypical pattern of eye movement. The human amygdala and hippocampus are involved in various aspects of face processing; however, it remains unclear how they encode the content of fixations when viewing faces. To answer this question, we employed single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking when participants viewed natural face stimuli. We found a class of neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus that encoded salient facial features such as the eyes and mouth. With a control experiment using non-face stimuli, we further showed that feature selectivity was specific to faces. We also found another population of neurons that differentiated saccades to the eyes vs. the mouth. Population decoding confirmed our results and further revealed the temporal dynamics of face feature coding. Interestingly, we found that the amygdala and hippocampus played different roles in encoding facial features. Lastly, we revealed two functional roles of feature-selective neurons: 1) they encoded the salient region for face recognition, and 2) they were related to perceived social trait judgments. Together, our results link eye movement with neural face processing and provide important mechanistic insights for human face perception. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-12-14 /pmc/articles/PMC8671411/ /pubmed/34907323 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02917-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Cao, Runnan Li, Xin Brandmeir, Nicholas J. Wang, Shuo Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
title | Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
title_full | Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
title_fullStr | Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
title_full_unstemmed | Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
title_short | Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
title_sort | encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8671411/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34907323 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02917-1 |
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