ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Innate face-selectivity in the brain of young domestic chicks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- The naive brain detects face-to-face biological motion.iScience · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of innate preference for upward motion.iScience · 2026Article
- A Visual Behavioral Training Study of Categorical Face Pattern Recognition in Mice.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Neural representation of object category and viewpoint in the entopallium of pigeons.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Layers of Social Meaning: Innate, Acquired, and Deliberative Levels of Referential Signal Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Editorial: Processing of face and other animacy cues in the brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Assessing preferences for adult versus juvenile features in young animals: Newly hatched chicks spontaneously approach red and large stimuli.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- Innate face-selectivity in the brain of young domestic chicks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- When sounds come alive: animacy in the auditory sense.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Face detection mechanisms: NatureFrontiers in neuroscience · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Shortly after birth, both naïve animals and newborn babies exhibit a spontaneous attraction to faces and face-like stimuli. While neurons selectively responding to faces have been found in the inferotemporal cortex of adult primates, face-selective domains in the brains of young monkeys seem to develop only later in life after exposure to faces. This has fueled a debate on the role of experience in the development of face-detector mechanisms, since face preferences are well documented in naïve animals, such as domestic chicks reared without exposure to faces. Here, we demonstrate that neurons in a higher-order processing brain area of one-week-old face-naïve domestic chicks selectively respond to a face-like configuration. Our single-cell recordings show that these neurons do not respond to alternative configurations or isolated facial features. Moreover, the population activity of face-selective neurons accurately encoded the face-like stimulus as a unique category. Thus, our findings show that face selectivity is present in the brains of very young animals without preexisting experience.
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