Category Selectivity for Face and Scene Recognition in Human Medial Parietal Cortex

• Published in: Current biology 2020-07, Vol.30 (14), p.2707-2715.e3
• Main Authors: Woolnough, Oscar, Rollo, Patrick S., Forseth, Kiefer J., Kadipasaoglu, Cihan M., Ekstrom, Arne D., Tandon, Nitin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Cohort Studies; default network; Electroencephalography; Face - physiology; Facial Recognition - physiology; Female; hippocampus; Humans; intracranial recording; Male; memory; Memory - physiology; Middle Aged; Parahippocampal Gyrus - physiology; Parietal Lobe - physiology; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; posterior cingulate; prosopagnosia; recognition; Recognition, Psychology - physiology; retrosplenial cortex; stereoelectroencephalography; subdural grids; Temporal Lobe - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0960-9822; 1879-0445
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.018

The rapid recognition and memory of faces and scenes implies the engagement of category-specific computational hubs in the ventral visual stream with the distributed cortical memory network. To better understand how recognition and identification occur in humans, we performed direct intracranial recordings, in a large cohort of patients (n = 50), from the medial parietal cortex (MPC) and the medial temporal lobe (MTL), structures known to be engaged during face and scene identification. We discovered that the MPC is topologically tuned to face and scene recognition, with clusters in MPC performing scene recognition bilaterally and face recognition in right subparietal sulcus. The MTL displayed a selectivity gradient with anterior, entorhinal cortex showing face selectivity and posterior parahippocampal regions showing scene selectivity. In both MPC and MTL, stimulus-specific identifiable exemplars led to greater activity in these cortical patches. These two regions work in concert for recognition of faces and scenes. Feature selectivity and identity-sensitive activity in the two regions was coincident, and they exhibited theta-phase locking during face and scene recognition. These findings together provide clear evidence for a specific role of subregions in the MPC for the recognition of unique entities. •Medial parietal cortex (MPC) has category-selective regions for faces and scenes•MPC subregions prefer recognizable examples of their selective stimuli•MPC shows category-selective interactions with medial temporal lobe (MTL)•MPC and MTL show coincident activity for category-specific identification Ventral visual and memory regions contain face- and scene-specific clusters of cortex. Woolnough et al. use multiregional intracranial recordings in a large cohort to reveal this organization extends to medial parietal cortex, which plays a role in our ability to identify faces and scenes, which it does via its connections with other memory regions.