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A network of face patches in human prefrontal cortex for social processing of faces

Farahani, A.; Izadkhah, M.; Hamidi, R.; Yargholi, E.; Hossein-Zadeh, G.-A.; Rajimehr, R.

2025-05-05 neuroscience
10.1101/2025.05.05.652210 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The human cerebral cortex contains localized regions for processing faces. These regions or patches, which are classically found in the occipito-temporal cortex, encode visual properties of faces. Using naturalistic movie-watching fMRI data from 176 human subjects and multivariate functional connectivity analysis, here we comprehensively characterize a novel network of four frontal face patches (FFPs) arranged dorsoventrally in the lateral prefrontal cortex. FFPs are strongly coupled with a face-selective region in the middle superior temporal sulcus, appear to be primarily involved in processing high-level social aspects of faces during movie-watching, and show partial correlations of activity with distinct cognitive networks. Activations in FFPs are correlated with the performance of subjects in a social cognition task. We further identify two groups of subjects who showed a remarkable difference in the topographical organization of FFPs. The discovery of FFPs provides new insights into the understanding of social processing in the brain.

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