Neural representations of faces in the monkey limbic cortices

Personal familiarity is defined as the familiarity to a specific individual with whom the subject has some strong personal relationship. A typical example of the personal familiarity is that to mother or father of the subject's own. It has been shown in many previous studies that personal familiarity was critically important in face recognition. However, neural basis for the processing of personal familiarity is not well known. In this study, to investigate neuronal basis of the processing of personal familiarity, single neuronal activity was recorded from the perirhinal, posterior cingulate and retrosplenial cortices of monkeys during a passive viewing of various faces which were different in terms of personal familiarity. As the result, neural activities which showed some selectivity to personal familiarity were recorded from these limbic cortices, implying crucial roles of them in the processing of personal familiarity.