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Faces represent important objects to primates. In this Review, Janis Hesse and Doris Tsao provide a comprehensive overview of the face patch system in macaques. They also argue that understanding this system may provide more general insights into high-level object representation.

Inferotemporal cortex (IT) neurons respond to specific objects but the precise neural mechanisms for clutter-invariant representation is not known. Here the authors show that face and body patch IT neurons respond to multiple objects with winner-take-all, contralateral-take-all or weighted averaging depending on the stimulus properties.

Tree shrews show a primate-like hierarchical organization in their visual pathway and object decoding accuracy, along with strongly face-selective cells, demonstrating how core computational principles of visual form processing found in primates are conserved yet compressed.

Analyses of consummatory reproductive behaviours in male mice uncover a brain mechanism whereby an internal state can attribute a social quality to a generic touch to initiate purposeful reproductive actions.

Primate inferotemporal cortex contains a coarse map of object space consisting of four networks, identified using functional imaging, electrophysiology and deep networks.

Neuropixels 1.0 NHP is a 45-mm, high-density silicon probe capable of recording large numbers of neurons with single-neuron resolution from most areas in a macaque’s brain.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

This Comment calls on scientists to acknowledge how insufficient communication and limited engagement beyond academia have deepened the divide between science and the public. Restoring trust requires a paradigm shift in which scientists accept that the responsibility to champion science lies with us. We propose a new model in which public communication and advocacy are considered as essential to our mission as rigor and reproducibility — critical not only for safeguarding science, but also for ensuring that its benefits reach all segments of the societies we serve.

We examined how familiar faces are encoded in inferotemporal, perirhinal and temporal pole face patches, and found that relative response magnitude to familiar versus unfamiliar faces was not a stable indicator of familiarity in any patch.

Although the existence of face-selective processing in the temporal lobes is well-accepted, the existence of similar patches in frontal cortex is debated, with contradictory evidence. This study used fMRI in alert macaques to identify three face-selective regions in ventral prefrontal cortex, one of which was strongly lateralized to the right hemisphere.

Cells in a primate face area are sensitive to both specific face parts and the presence of the whole, upright face reports an electrophysiology study in monkeys. Cells in the middle face patch detected distinct constellations of face parts, but their tuning amplitude was modulated by the presence of a whole, upright face.

Scientists have long debated the extent to which different brain regions are specialized for specific tasks. Here the authors show that electrical microstimulation of face-selective brain regions in the temporal lobe of monkeys distorts the animal's percept not just of faces but also of certain non-face objects including round objects.

Neurons in the inferotemporal cortex (IT) encode object identity; however, how object color is represented here is not well understood. Here the authors report that neurons from three color patches in macaque IT encode significant information regarding the hue and shape of objects in a hierarchical manner.

Launched in 2013, the BRAIN Initiative (BRAIN) in the United States aimed to unlock the mysteries of the brain and develop new treatments for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. The success of this program is evidenced by the accelerated discoveries and development of interventions that are happening in real time. However, a recent 40% cut in funding for BRAIN threatens this once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve fundamental mysteries of the brain and achieve treatment breakthroughs that we once thought impossible.

Contrary to the view that urbanization is a major driver of the global rise in obesity, the global increase in body-mass index is shown to be mostly due to increases in the body-mass indexes of rural populations.

One of the ambitions of computational neuroscience is that we will continue to make improvements in the field of artificial intelligence that will be informed by advances in our understanding of how the brains of various species evolved to process information. To that end, here the authors propose an expanded version of the Turing test that involves embodied sensorimotor interactions with the world as a new framework for accelerating progress in artificial intelligence.