Neural mechanisms of face familiarity and learning in the human amygdala and hippocampus.

ABSTRACT: Recognizing familiar faces and learning new faces play an important role in social cognition. However, the underlying neural computational mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we record from single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus and find a greater neuronal representational distance between pairs of familiar faces than unfamiliar faces, suggesting that neural representations for familiar faces are more distinct. Representational distance increases with exposures to the same identity, suggesting that neural face representations are sharpened with learning and familiarization. Furthermore, representational distance is positively correlated with visual dissimilarity between faces, and exposure to visually similar faces increases representational distance, thus sharpening neural repr

SUBMITTER: Cao R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10834150 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature