Viewpoint-invariant face recognition is thought to be subserved by a distributed network of occipitotemporal face-selective areas that, except for the human anterior temporal lobe, have been shown to also contain face-orientation information. This review begins by highlighting the importance of bilateral symmetry for viewpoint-invariant recognition and face-orientation perception. Then, monkey electrophysiological evidence is surveyed describing key tuning properties of face-selective neurons—including neurons bimodally tuned to mirror-symmetric face-views—followed by studies combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivariate pattern analyses to probe the representation of face-orientation and identity information in humans. Altogether, neuroimaging studies suggest that face-identity is gradually disentangled from face-orientation information along the ventral visual processing stream. The evidence seems to diverge, however, regarding the prevalent form of tuning of neural populations in human face-selective areas. In this context, caveats possibly leading to erroneous inferences regarding mirror-symmetric coding are exposed, including the need to distinguish angular from Euclidean distances when interpreting multivariate pattern analyses. On this basis, this review argues that evidence from the fusiform face area is best explained by a view-sensitive code reflecting head angular disparity, consistent with a role of this area in face-orientation perception. Finally, the importance is stressed of explicit models relating neural properties to large-scale signals.

视点不变的面部识别被认为是由枕颞面部选择区域的分布式网络服务的，该区域除了人前颞叶外，还显示还包含面部定向信息。这篇综述首先强调了双边对称性对于视点不变识别和面部定向感知的重要性。然后，对猴子的电生理证据进行了调查，描述了脸部选择性神经元（包括双峰调整为镜像对称脸部视图的神经元）的关键调节特性，随后进行了功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和多元模式分析相结合的研究，以探究脸部的表征-人类的定向和身份信息。共，神经影像学研究表明，沿着腹侧视觉处理流逐渐将面部识别与面部定向信息区分开。但是，关于人脸选择区域中神经种群调整的普遍形式，证据似乎存在分歧。在这种情况下，暴露了可能导致关于镜像对称编码的错误推断的警告，包括在解释多元模式分析时需要区分角度距离与欧几里得距离。在此基础上，本综述认为，梭形面部区域的证据最好由反映头部角度差异的视敏代码解释，这与该区域在面部定向感知中的作用一致。最后，强调了将神经属性与大规模信号相关联的显式模型的重要性。