(A) study on the task-dependent discriminability of individual face representations in the fusiform face area

Abstract

In our daily life, we can easily distinguish thousands of faces in spite of the high similarity of human faces. This ability of face discrimination is indispensable for face identification in our social interactions. The fusiform face area (FFA) is thought to be involved in face discrimination or identification, yet the effect of behavioral goals on the discriminability of individual faces in this region remains unclear. Here we investigated neural response patterns during three different tasks in the FFA using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that discriminability of individual faces in the FFA depends on the current behavioral goal. Individual face identity could be decoded from the right FFA when the participants were asked to distinguish individual faces whereas decoding was not successful when they had to determine common features such as race or gender of the same faces. These results suggest that the specificity of neural responses in the FFA for individual-level face information is flexible, depending on the behavioral goals.