Figure 3.

Freeman and Johnson (2016) posited that the fusiform gyrus (FG), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and anterior temporal lobe (ATL) together play an important role in the coordination of sensory and social processes during perception. The FG is centrally involved in visual processing of faces, the ATL broadly involved in semantic storage and retrieval processes, and the OFC involved in visual predictions and top-down expectation signals. In this perspective, when perceiving another person’s face, evolving representations in the FG lead the ATL to retrieve social-conceptual associations related to tentatively perceived characteristics. This social-conceptual information available in the ATL, in turn, is used by the OFC to implement top-down visual predictions (e.g., based on social-conceptual knowledge) that can flexibility modulate FG representations of faces more in line with those predictions. Such a network would support a flexible integration of bottom-up facial cues and higher-order social cognitive processes. Adapted from Freeman and Johnson (2016).