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Graduate Student Award Winner 

Neural representations of faces are widely distributed and highly individualized

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 2 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon D.

Ivette Colón^1,2 (), Timothy Rogers^1,2; ¹University of Wisconsin - Madison, ²Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

There is a historical assumption that our brains are a modular system— where discrete areas handle particular aspects of processing, with perhaps the most famous example being the FFA (fusiform face area) for face processing (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006). While there is no doubt that certain areas are involved in face processing, increasing evidence suggests that face processing relies on distributed cortical networks beyond traditional face-selective regions (Cox & Rogers, 2021; Nestor et al., 2011). In this work, we gathered neural representations for a set of highly controlled faces, places, and objects from 17 people in a slow event-related functional MRI design. Using a multivariate decoding technique called Iterated LASSO, we found— separately for each participant, and across two scans per person— anatomically distributed patterns of voxels that reliably distinguish stimulus categories. We used these signal-carrying voxels as candidate stimulation areas in a transcranial magnetic stimulation task to examine whether brain areas outside of canonical face-processing areas causally contribute to participants' face processing. We show that (a) information about faces is encoded throughout the cortex, (b) where exactly it is encoded is variable across individuals, (c) these differences are stable over time, and (d) stimulation of these areas shows similar behavioral patterns to stimulation of established face processing areas. Together, these results suggest that neural representations of faces may be more widely distributed and individualized than previously thought.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Person perception