fMRI studies in the mid and late 1990s described an area in
the human brain that showed strongly increased blood flow
in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments
when people viewed pictures of faces compared to
pictures of objects (1). This seemed to offer an ideal potential
preparation for tackling the problem of how the brain
extracts global visual form: a small piece of brain specialized
to encode a single visual form. Thus, 12 years ago, Winrich
Freiwald and I began a journey into exploring the neural
basis of face processing. We decided to look for a face-selective
area in macaque monkeys, reasoning that it would
not be unreasonable to find such a region in monkeys, since
face recognition is also integral to macaques—and most
importantly, if we did find such a region, then we could
target an electrode to the region (something not possible in
humans) and directly record from individual neurons to ask
how they are encoding faces. In my talk, I will discuss the
anatomical and functional organization of the macaque face
processing system, as well as the more recently discovered
macaque scene processing system. How are regions within
these two systems system connected to each other and the
rest of the brain? What representations are used in face and
scene-selective regions? What is the contribution of different
regions to behavior? What information is communicated
between regions
