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A MAP for other people’s faces has been discovered in the brain.

We already knew that our body parts are represented in the brain by different regions of neurons. These regions tend to preserve the basic spatial layout of the body: neurons that represent fingers are closer to neurons that represent arms than feet, say.

Now Linda Henriksson at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, has discovered that the same goes for other people’s faces. Her team scanned 12 people’s brains as they looked at images of facial features to see which areas became active. This revealed a region in the occipital face area in which features next to each other on a real face are organised together in the brain’s representation of that face. The team plans to explore differences between people’s face maps to see if they relate to their ability to recognise faces (Cortex, ).

This article appeared in print under the headline “Other people’s faces, on the brain”