期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2018
卷号：115
期号：3
页码：584-588
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1716341115
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：A recent paper demonstrated that the pattern of firing rates across ∼100 neurons in the anterior medial face patch is closely related to which human face (of 2,000) had been presented to a monkey [Chang L, Tsao DY (2017) Cell 169:1013–1028]. In addition, the firing rates for these neurons can be predicted for a novel human face. Although it is clear from this work that the firing rates of these face patch neurons encode faces, the properties of the face code have not yet been fully described. Based on an analysis of 98 neurons responding to 2,000 faces, I conclude that the anterior medial face patch uses a combinatorial rate code, one with an exponential distribution of neuron rates that has a mean rate conserved across faces. Thus, the face code is maximally informative (technically, maximum entropy) and is very similar to the code used by the fruit fly olfactory system.
关键词：face encoding ; face recognition ; combinatorial code
