National Eye Institute funded research at University of Tsukuba demonstrated that faces of familiar individuals with whom one has frequent social interactions with are learned in the basal ganglia region (specifically the tail part of the striatum) through the same neural mechanisms that recognize the value of objects.
People experience a sense of familiarity from those who provide them with food and care on a daily basis. For children and pets, remembering the faces of such individuals is crucial for survival. The basal ganglia, specifically the striatum tail, located in the deep region of the brain, plays a critical role in associating objects with their value through long-term experience. However, insight into how this mechanism operates in complex social situations, such as daily life, which is different from laboratory environments, remains unclear.
In this study, researchers presented monkeys with images of familiar and unfamiliar faces and recorded the neural activity from the tail part of the striatum . The neuronal mechanism used for storing the faces of familiar individuals in the brain was found to be the same as that used for remembering the value of objects.
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