Short-latency category specific neural responses to human faces in macaque inferotemporal cortex

In this article I would present evidence to show that timing of the flow of neural signals within the ventral visual stream is a crucial part of the neural code for categorization of faces. We recorded the activity of 554 inferotemporal neurons from two macaque monkeys performing a fixation task. More than 1000 object images including human and non-primate animal faces were presented up to 10 times, each for 105 ms without intervals. About one-third of the cells had selective responses to both human and non-primate animal face categories. The onset latencies were significantly shorter for responses to human faces than those to animal faces (P