Kavli Prize Laureate Lectures
Kavli Prize Laureate Lectures
Neuroscience
Nancy Kanwisher, Doris Ying Tsao, and Winrich Freiwald are being honored with the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for the discovery of a highly localized and specialized system for representation of faces in human and non-human primate neocortex.
As part of the Kavli Prize Week program, they will give lectures on their research at Rikshospitalet in Oslo.
Nancy Kanwisher
Nancy Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was the first to prove that a specific area in the human neocortex is dedicated to recognizing faces, now called the fusiform face area. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) she found individual differences in the location of this area and devised an analysis technique to effectively localize specialized functional regions in the brain. This technique is now widely used and applied to domains beyond the face recognition system.
Doris Ying Tsao
Doris Ying Tsao is a professor in the neurobiology division of the department of molecular & cell biology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
Elaborating on Kanwisher’s findings, Winrich Freiwald and Doris Tsao studied macaques and mapped out six distinct brain regions, known as the face patch system, including these regions’ functional specialization and how they are connected. By recording the activity of individual brain cells, they revealed how cells in some face patches specialize in faces with particular views.
Tsao proceeded to identify how the face patches work together to identify a face, through a specific code that enables single cells to identify faces by assembling information of facial features. For example, some cells respond to the presence of hair, others to the distance between the eyes.
Winrich Freiwald
Winrich Freiwald is the Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery professor of neurosciences and behavior at The Rockefeller University.
Continuing his collaboration with Tsao, Freiwald uncovered that a separate brain region, called the temporal pole, accelerates our recognition of familiar faces, and that some cells are selectively responsive to familiar faces.
