“Hearing faces and seeing voices”: Amodal coding of person identity in the human brain

Hasan, Bashar; Valdés-Sosa, Mitchell; Groß, Joachim; Belin, Pascal

doi:10.1038/srep37494

Cited by 34 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Previous studies using face or voice stimuli have found amodal representations of person identity in unimodal and multimodal face-processing regions, including the FFA, superior temporal sulcus, and the ATL (5,16,42,45). In the present paradigm, the only region consistently demonstrating classification of identity across all stimulus types was the ATL.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 54%

“…Research in nonhuman primates has shown that cells in anterior-ventral temporal cortex are highly sensitive to particular facial identities as well as to facial familiarity (56,57). Previous studies in humans using intracranial recording (16) or fMRI analyses (15,42,45) have suggested that the ATL can distinguish between different people using their faces, voices, or names. Our study extends these findings by using sophisticated multivariate analyses and a wider range of stimulus categories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

Wang

Collins

Koski

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Social behavior is often shaped by the rich storehouse of biographical information that we hold for other people. In our daily life, we rapidly and flexibly retrieve a host of biographical details about individuals in our social network, which often guide our decisions as we navigate complex social interactions. Even abstract traits associated with an individual, such as their political affiliation, can cue a rich cascade of person-specific knowledge. Here, we asked whether the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) serves as a hub for a distributed neural circuit that represents person knowledge. Fifty participants across two studies learned biographical information about fictitious people in a 2-d training paradigm. On day 3, they retrieved this biographical information while undergoing an fMRI scan. A series of multivariate and connectivity analyses suggest that the ATL stores abstract person identity representations. Moreover, this region coordinates interactions with a distributed network to support the flexible retrieval of person attributes. Together, our results suggest that the ATL is a central hub for representing and retrieving person knowledge.person knowledge | anterior temporal lobe | person identity node | semantic memory | social neuroscience A s social creatures, it is essential that we develop a rich storehouse of knowledge about other members of our social network, such as who they are, how they look and sound, where they live, and what they do for a living. However, little is known about how and where such "person knowledge" is represented, stored, and retrieved in the brain. This inquiry is challenging because person knowledge is highly multimodal and multifaceted, being linked to both abstract features such as personality and social status as well as more concrete features such as eye color; in addition, familiar individuals are associated with detailed episodic and semantic memories (e.g., memories of shared experiences and biographic information) (1, 2). The neural circuit for person knowledge must therefore have the ability to combine multiple sources of information into an abstract representation accessible from multiplicative cues.An influential theory by Burton and Bruce (3) proposes that person recognition is achieved through a hierarchical process that begins with the activation of modality-specific recognition units that selectively respond to the presence of a known face, name, or voice. This information is then sent to an amodal person identity node (PIN) that integrates information from the modality-specific recognition units into a multimodal representation for that individual. Excitation of the PIN ultimately allows the retrieval of personspecific semantic information independently of stimulus modality (4, 5). A similar design is embedded in the "hub-and-spoke" theory of semantic knowledge, which proposes that different features of a concept (such as its color or taste) are distributed throughout the brain (the "spokes") and that a centralized "hub" integrates these features into a cohe...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 54%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

Wang

Collins

Koski

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The MTG has been shown to respond to identity “cross-classification”, i.e. to both facial and vocal identity processing (Awwad Shiekh Hasan, Valdes-Sosa, Gross, & Belin, 2016), and it is also engaged during self versus other face recognition (Verosky & Todorov, 2010). Methodological differences likely play a role in our results, as limbic responses to negative expressions in depression may depend on the nature of the task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The neurobiology of self face recognition among depressed adolescents

Quevedo

Harms

Sauder

et al. 2018

Journal of Affective Disorders

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The neurophysiology of self-face recognition is altered in adolescent depression. Specifically, depression was associated with decreased activity in neural areas that support emotional and associative processing for positive self-faces and increased processing for neutral self-faces. These results suggest that depression in adolescents is associated with hypoactive emotional processing and encoding of positive self-related visual information. This abnormal neural activity at the intersection of reward and self-processing among depressed youth might have long lasting impact in self-formation and future adult self-representations, given that adolescence is a sensitive period for self-development.

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“…This could be related to the complex functional organization in the region encompassing the pSTS and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) (Patel, Sestieri, et Corbetta 2019). On the right hemisphere, this region was shown to hold high-level social functions such as the representation of identity by integrating both facial and vocal information (Watson et al 2014;Hasan et al 2016;Davies-Thompson et al 2018;Tsantani et al 2019). In the left hemisphere, this region was mainly associated to the dorsal pathway of language implicated in articulatory and production mechanisms (Hickok et Poeppel 2004).…”

Section: Functional Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plis de passage in the Superior Temporal Sulcus: Morphology and local connectivity

Bodin

Pron

Mao

et al. 2020

Preprint

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While there is a profusion of functional investigations involving the superior temporal sulcus (STS), our knowledge of the anatomy of this sulcus is still limited by a large variability across individuals. Several “plis de passage” (PPs), annectant gyri buried inside the fold, can separate the STS into distinct segments and could explain part of the observed variability. However, an accurate characterization is lacking to properly extract and fully understand the nature of PPs. The aim of the present study is twofold: i. to characterize the STS PPs by directly identifying them within individual STS, using the geometry of the surrounding surface and considering both deep and superficial PPs. ii. to test the hypothesis that PPs constitute local increases of the short-range structural connectivity. Performed on 90 subjects from the Human Connectome Project database, our study revealed that PPs constitute surface landmarks that can be identified from the geometry of the STS walls and that they constitute critical pathways of the U-shaped white-matter connecting the two banks of the STS. Specifically, a larger amount of fibers was extracted at the location of PPs compared to other locations in the STS. This quantity was also larger for superficial PPs than for deep buried ones. These findings raise new hypotheses regarding the relation between the cortical surface geometry and structural connectivity, as well as the possible role of PPs in the functional organization of the STS.

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“Hearing faces and seeing voices”: Amodal coding of person identity in the human brain

Cited by 34 publications

References 37 publications

Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

The neurobiology of self face recognition among depressed adolescents

Plis de passage in the Superior Temporal Sulcus: Morphology and local connectivity

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