Facial Motion Activates a Dedicated Network Within the Brain

Scientists know that two particularly social and visual creatures — humans and rhesus macaque monkeys — have a network of small areas within their brains that become active when shown still images of faces. However, it hasn’t been clear if the same areas are responsible for processing changing expressions and other facial movements. New research, built on the earlier work, found that these face-processing areas — which they call patches — within a macaque’s brain appear to respond selectively to the motion of faces, while reacting much less to other types of motion. “Based on input from the eyes, the brain’s visual system reconstructs reality, a process that starts out with attributes, such as form, motion and color, that the brain then integrates to build meaningful representations of the world,” said a lead researcher. “This work reveals how the macaque face processing system reunites two individual stream of visual information — face form and face motion — as it recreates the social reality of a face as a macaque sees it.” While the system for processing still-faces appears similar between humans and macaques, studies of facial motion gave inconsistent results between the species. To read more about this study, click here.