Person recognition and the brain: Merging evidence from patients and healthy individuals

Abstract

Recognizing other persons is a key skill in social interaction, whether it is with our family at home or with our colleagues at work. Due to brain lesions such as stroke, or neurodegenerative disease, or due to psychiatric conditions, abilities in recognizing even personally familiar persons can be impaired. The underlying causes in the human brain have not yet been well understood. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of studies reporting locations of brain damage in patients impaired in person-identity recognition, and relate the results to a quantitative meta-analysis based on functional imaging studies investigating person-identity recognition in healthy individuals. We identify modality-specific brain areas involved in recognition from different person characteristics, and potential multimodal hubs for person processing in the anterior temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes and posterior cingulate. Our combined review is built on cognitive and neuroscientific models of face- and voice-identity recognition and revises them within the multimodal context of person-identity recognition. These results provide a novel framework for future research in person-identity recognition both in the clinical as well as basic neurosciences.

Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

“…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 coherent, modality-invariant concept (6)(7)(8).…”

“…Next, we asked whether the ATL acts as a neural switchboard, performing in concert with other brain regions to enable the retrieval of different facets of person knowledge in a flexible and context-appropriate manner (study 2). We focus on the ATL because multiple lines of evidence from neuropsychology, electrophysiology, and neuroimaging have documented the critical role of the ATL in person identification (4,5,(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16), person-related learning (10,(17)(18)(19)(20)(21), semantic memory (6)(7)(8), and abstract social knowledge (1,(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33). Individuals with ATL damage due to resection or stroke have multimodal person recognition deficits (34), lose access to stored knowledge about familiar people (35,36), and have difficulties learning information about new people (4,22,37,38).…”

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

“…Whether the PINs have a neuronal counterpart in the human brain remains unclear, in part owing to the fact that most studies of person recognition-either using neuropsychological assessment of patients with brain lesions, or neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy volunteers-have focused on single modality, mostly face, then, far second, voice; only few studies have investigated the cerebral bases of person recognition based on more than one sensory modality 1,4 . Lesion and neuroimaging studies have suggested potential candidate cortical areas for the PINs, including the precuneus 8 , parietal and hippocampal regions [9][10][11] , posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) 12,13 or the anterior temporal lobes 14 .…”

“…Lesion and neuroimaging studies have suggested potential candidate cortical areas for the PINs, including the precuneus 8 , parietal and hippocampal regions [9][10][11] , posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) 12,13 or the anterior temporal lobes 14 . However a PIN, as defined in Bruce & Young (1986), would correspond to a patient with a brain Scientific RepoRts | 6:37494 | DOI: 10.1038/srep37494 lesion preserving recognition and feeling of familiarity based on single modalities separately but who could not retrieve semantic information on the person, and not associate the face and voice of the person; such a patient has not yet been identified 1 . Other studies suggest that amodal representations could rather emerge from cross-talk interactions between modality-specific areas 1 : voice and face-sensitive areas are not only connected via direct anatomical projections 15 but also functionally connected during familiar voice recognition 16 .…”

“…However a PIN, as defined in Bruce & Young (1986), would correspond to a patient with a brain Scientific RepoRts | 6:37494 | DOI: 10.1038/srep37494 lesion preserving recognition and feeling of familiarity based on single modalities separately but who could not retrieve semantic information on the person, and not associate the face and voice of the person; such a patient has not yet been identified 1 . Other studies suggest that amodal representations could rather emerge from cross-talk interactions between modality-specific areas 1 : voice and face-sensitive areas are not only connected via direct anatomical projections 15 but also functionally connected during familiar voice recognition 16 . Multi-voxel pattern analyses (MVPA) offer a powerful means of extracting information contained in distributed fMRI activity 17,18 : their enhanced sensitivity compared to classical univariate fMRI analyses has contributed to clarifying the neural correlates of unimodal face [19][20][21][22][23] or voice 24,25 identity processing.…”