The critical role of the right anterior fusiform gyrus in unfamiliar face identity discrimination.

The contribution of the anterior fusiform gyrus (AntFG) in human face identity recognition (FIR) has been largely neglected, mainly due to a large signal dropout in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) affecting this region. Here, we report two cases in which direct electrical stimulation of the right face-selective AntFG induced transient FIR impairment. Upon stimulation in this region, patients were unable to select a photograph of a famous face among 3 exemplars, reporting that all the faces looked the same. Most interestingly, they also failed at matching concurrently presented pictures of unfamiliar faces against a distractor face, with all face identities once again perceived as identical. Together with large electrophysiological signals of unfamiliar face identity individuation recorded in the stimulated sites, these observations support a critical role of the right AntFG, together with connected contralateral and posterior face-selective regions, in extracting idiosyncratic facial features independently of long-term familiarity.