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1. Region-specific fMRI dictionary for decoding face verification in humans

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2017.7966337  

   Yadav, Daksha; Kohli, Naman; Nagpal, Shruti; Singh, Maneet; Pandey, Prateekshit; Vatsa, Mayank; Singh, Richa; Noore, Afzel; Prabhakaran, Gokulraj; Mahajan, Harsh (May 2017, International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB))

   This paper focuses on decoding the process of face verification in the human brain using fMRI responses. 2400 fMRI responses are collected from different participants while they perform face verification on genuine and imposter stimuli face pairs. The first part of the paper analyzes the responses covering both cognitive and fMRI neuro-imaging results. With an average verification accuracy of 64.79% by human participants, the results of the cognitive analysis depict that the performance of female participants is significantly higher than the male participants with respect to imposter pairs. The results of the neuroimaging analysis identifies regions of the brain such as the left fusiform gyrus, caudate nucleus, and superior frontal gyrus that are activated when participants perform face verification tasks. The second part of the paper proposes a novel two-level fMRI dictionary learning approach to predict if the stimuli observed is genuine or imposter using the brain activation data for selected regions. A comparative analysis with existing machine learning techniques illustrates that the proposed approach yields at least 4.5% higher classification accuracy than other algorithms. It is envisioned that the result of this study is the first step in designing brain-inspired automatic face verification algorithms. 

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2. The infant’s view redefines the problem of referential uncertainty in early word learning

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107019118  

   Yu, Chen; Zhang, Yayun; Slone, Lauren K.; Smith, Linda B. (December 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   The learning of first object names is deemed a hard problem due to the uncertainty inherent in mapping a heard name to the intended referent in a cluttered and variable world. However, human infants readily solve this problem. Despite considerable theoretical discussion, relatively little is known about the uncertainty infants face in the real world. We used head-mounted eye tracking during parent–infant toy play and quantified the uncertainty by measuring the distribution of infant attention to the potential referents when a parent named both familiar and unfamiliar toy objects. The results show that infant gaze upon hearing an object name is often directed to a single referent which is equally likely to be a wrong competitor or the intended target. This bimodal gaze distribution clarifies and redefines the uncertainty problem and constrains possible solutions. 

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3. Violations of social expectations enhance infants' learning

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106227  

   Cao, Qiong; Smith-Flores, Alexis; Zhou, Joanna; Perez, Jasmin; Feigenson, Lisa (November 2025, Cognition)

   Not AvailableWhen infants see objects behave in surprising ways, they not only notice these violations, but also experience enhanced learning about the objects. Although infants also notice when social agents behave in surprising ways, it is unclear whether violations of social expectations similarly enhance learning. Here we asked whether surprising events in the social domain amplify learning. In three experiments, 16- to 19-month-old infants saw a person behave either expectedly or unexpectedly towards an object, and then had the opportunity to learn about the object or person involved in the event. Experiment 1 presented infants with a person who produced an emotional reaction that was congruent with a target object, as expected, or produced a reaction that was surprisingly incongruent; Experiments 2 and 3 presented infants with a person whose preference among two different goal objects remained consistent, as expected, or suddenly reversed, defying expectations. Across Experiments 1-3, infants exhibited enhanced learning about both the object and, to some extent, the person involved in the surprising event. Combined with previous findings, these findings suggest that early expectations support learning in the social domain as well as in the physical domain. 

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4. The motivated social brain: a neurodevelopmental and evolutionary framework for social curiosity

   https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1740  

   Grossmann, Tobias (September 2025, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)

   Recent comparative findings by Lewiset al.(Lewis LS, Ritov O, Herrmann E, Reddy RB, Sanchez-Amaro A, Gopnik A, Engelmann JM. 2025 Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions.Proc. R. Soc. B.292, 20242242.) reveal a shared drive in chimpanzees and children to seek information about third-party social interactions, even at a material cost. This commentary situates these results within a neurodevelopmental and evolutionary framework, proposing that social curiosity is a manifestation of a deeply conserved, motivationally driven system for social valuation centred on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We synthesize neuroimaging evidence showing selective engagement of mPFC while infants attend to third-party social interactions. We propose that the mPFC, as a primary valuation hub, guides the specialization of social perceptual regions over development. This framework interprets social curiosity as a high-level cognitive function driven by the mPFC, assigning intrinsic reward value to social information, consistent with the social information hypothesis. The willingness of older children to preferentially orient to and forgo a reward for social information can thus be understood as the behavioural output of a brain system calibrated from infancy to tag such information as intrinsically valuable. 

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5. A Flexible Neural Representation of Faces in the Human Brain

   https://doi.org/10.1093/texcom/tgaa055  

   Cao, Runnan; Li, Xin; Todorov, Alexander; Wang, Shuo (January 2020, Cerebral Cortex Communications)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract An important question in human face perception research is to understand whether the neural representation of faces is dynamically modulated by context. In particular, although there is a plethora of neuroimaging literature that has probed the neural representation of faces, few studies have investigated what low-level structural and textural facial features parametrically drive neural responses to faces and whether the representation of these features is modulated by the task. To answer these questions, we employed 2 task instructions when participants viewed the same faces. We first identified brain regions that parametrically encoded high-level social traits such as perceived facial trustworthiness and dominance, and we showed that these brain regions were modulated by task instructions. We then employed a data-driven computational face model with parametrically generated faces and identified brain regions that encoded low-level variation in the faces (shape and skin texture) that drove neural responses. We further analyzed the evolution of the neural feature vectors along the visual processing stream and visualized and explained these feature vectors. Together, our results showed a flexible neural representation of faces for both low-level features and high-level social traits in the human brain. 

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