Face cells in orbitofrontal cortex represent social categories
Open accessAbstract
Perceiving social and emotional information from faces is a critical primate skill. For this purpose, primates evolved dedicated cortical architecture, especially in occipitotemporal areas, utilizing face-selective cells. Less understood face-selective neurons are present in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and are our object of study. We examined 179 face-selective cells in the lateral sulcus of the OFC by characterizing their responses to a rich set of photographs of conspecific faces varying in age, gender, and facial expression. Principal component analysis and unsupervised cluster analysis of stimulus space both revealed that face cells encode face dimensions for social categories and emotions. Categories represented strongly were facial expressions (grin and threat versus lip smack), juvenile, and female monkeys. Cluster analyses of a control population of nearby cells lacking face selectivity did not categorize face stimuli in a meaningful way, suggesting that only face-selective cells directly support face categorization in OFC. Time course analyses of face cell activity from stimulus onset showed that faces were discriminated from nonfaces early, followed by within-face categorization for social and emotion content (i.e., young and facial expression). Face cells revealed no response to acoustic stimuli such as vocalizations and were poorly modulated by vocalizations added to faces. Neuronal responses remained stable when paired with positive or negative reinforcement, implying that face cells encode social information but not learned reward value associated to faces. Overall, our results shed light on a substantial role of the OFC in the characterizations of facial information bearing on social and emotional behavior.
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The macaque OFC contains neurons that reflect face expression and face identity, social categories such as young faces, and position in the social hierarchy.
“The macaque OFC contains neurons that reflect face expression and face identity (both necessary to decode value and important in social behaviour) (Thorpe et al., 1983; Rolls et al., 2006), and also social categories such as young faces (Barat et al., 2018) and position in the social hierarchy (Munuera et al., 2018).”
From The orbitofrontal cortex: reward, emotion and depression (2020) · cites this paper as Barat et al., 2018
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- Authors
- Barat, E., Wirth, S., & Duhamel, J.-R.
- Affiliations
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, UMR 5229, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 69675 Bron Cedex, France;
- Lyon 1 Université (FR)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2018-11-05
- Volume
- 115
- Issue
- 47
- Pages
- E11158-E11167
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC6255179
- OpenAlex
- W2900248010
- Cited by
- 58
- References
- 75
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 2.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (BLAN-SVSE4-023-01, BS4-0010-01)
- Université de Lyon I & ANR (ANR-11-LABEX-0042)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Primate Behavior and Ecology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- orbitofrontal cortex, face-selective neurons, social categorization, facial expressions, emotional expression, Sylvian fissure, reward value
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Emotions, Face, Facial Expression, Female, Interpersonal Relations, Macaca mulatta, Male, Neurons, Perception, Temporal Lobe, Vocalization, Animal, Prefrontal Cortex
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