Processing of Face and Other Animacy Cues in the Brain

Faces and body parts/actions convey valuable information for detecting and identifying conspecifics and discerning their identity, age, sex, attractiveness, emotion, attention, and intentions. This visual information triggers specific behavioral and cognitive responses, both conscious and unconscious, that affect social non-verbal communication and interaction in humans. The ability to interpret facial and bodily cues is not unique to humans; various species, spanning both vertebrates and invertebrates, share this ability to some extent. Social information influences effective interactions between individuals and plays a critical role in survival. In both the human and non-human primate brain, networks of regions in the cortical and subcortical areas are involved in the processing of facial features and body parts/actions. Potential homologs exist in the so-called Neural Social Network of other vertebrates. A comprehensive understanding of the neural computation within each area and across areas requires further exploration. Additionally, it remains unclear to what extent the neural substrate and computation are shared across phylogeny. The perceptual abilities related to face and body parts/actions recognition have been investigated across diverse research domains, encompassing neuroscience, clinical neurology, psychology, ethology, primatology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive robotics. Despite substantial insights into the psychological/behavioral aspects of these abilities, as well as an understanding of the underlying neural substrates gained from prior studies, we still find ourselves at an early stage of comprehending the computational properties of the processing of the neural systems. For example, uncertainties persist regarding the exact differences in face processing between the cortical and subcortical pathways. The functional and organizational relationship between the face processing system and the body part/action processing system also remains unclear. Additionally, to what extent the computational properties are shared by different animal species is yet to be determined. Addressing these questions not only advances our understanding of the neural mechanisms of face and body parts/actions recognition but also contributes to unraveling the deficiency of certain developmental and psychiatric disorders. The objective of this Research Topic is to provide a platform by bringing together articles on the processing of faces, body parts/actions, and other animacy cues such as biological motion. We anticipate that the articles address the computational properties of neural processing of face, body parts/actions, or other animacy cues. These articles may encompass studies involving humans, animals, and even deep convolutional neural networks or robots, as long as they are relevant to the exploration of biological neural systems. While we anticipate a primary focus on empirical research papers, we also welcome theoretical analyses and critical reviews of previous work.