JOURNAL OF NEUROPSYCHIATRY 139 REGULAR ARTICLES Neural Substrates of Facial Recognition

Seventeen healthy normal volunteers performed three facial recognition tasks while their cerebral blood flow was measured with PET: categorizing faces according to gender, recognizing new faces, and recognizingfamiliarfaces. These tasks acti-vated three different pathways: respectively, the left inferior temporal lobe and left frontal cortex; a pre-dominantly right frontal-right parietal-left cerebel-tar network; and left lingual and left and right fusform gyri. These results suggest that humans use different brain regions in performing these three routine daily activities. The results are consis-tent with previous observations concerning organi-zation of extrastriate visual cortex in human and nonhuman primate lesion studies, including stud-ies of the unusual syndrome of prosopagnosia (loss of the ability to recognizefamiliarfaces with intact ability to recognize a face as a face)