Presented to Nancy Kanwisher, Winrich Freiwald, and Doris Tsao
For the discovery of a highly localized and specialized system for representation of faces in human and non-human primate neocortex.
2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience
2024 Kavli Prize for Neuroscience
Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, received the 2024 Kavli Prize for Neuroscience, along with Winrich Freiwald (Rockefeller University) and Doris Tsao (UC Berkeley). The award recognizes their research on how the human brain recognizes faces, a fact that was widely known but not understood.
Decades ago, Professor Kanwisher began using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to localize different areas in neocortex specialized for face processing; she first scanned her own brain, as she was looking at different images, including faces, food, and tools. She discovered that one specific region of her brain — a small area on the underside and on the right — had a much greater response to the images of faces than to other items. Somewhat surprisingly, the fusiform face area is in slightly different locations in each individual. Further research led her to develop an analysis technique to localize that region, a technique that is now in common use in brain-imaging studies.
In the course of their research, Professor Kanwisher and her colleagues have made some remarkable discoveries, learning that the fusiform face area is so responsive to faces that it responds to animal faces, cartoons, emojis, and abstract images of faces, much more so than to other body parts, including the back of the head. In 2020, they showed that the fusiform face area responds in blind people when they are touching a model of a human face.
Building on results
After reading the paper on the fusiform face area, Doris Tsao wanted to understand how a specific brain area can interpret complex images like faces and she started working with Winrich Freiwald, who was then a post-doc in the Kanwisher lab. The two mapped macaque monkey brains, which led to a deeper understanding of how those brains work to identify faces, distinguishing differences in facial structure and hairlines.
This work has been critically important for neuroscientists as they continue to work to understand the structure of the brain.
The Kavli Prizes
The award, presented by The Kavli Foundation in conjunction with the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, honors scientists making key developments in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.
Professor Nancy Kanwisher during the Kavli Awards Presentation in Oslo, September 2024. credit: Thomas B. Eckhoff / The Kavli Prize