A new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience shows that our understanding of who someone is—beyond just what they look like—can shape how our brain processes their face. Researchers found that non-visual areas of the brain, which are typically involved in thinking about people and social knowledge, were more active and better able to distinguish face identities when participants had gained deeper knowledge about the characters during a movie.
The study was motivated by the question of how we come to recognize familiar people. While repeated visual exposure helps the brain build stable representations of faces, we also accumulate conceptual information—like someone’s personality or role in a story. Past research had already shown that engaging with conceptual details enhances memory for faces, but it remained unclear whether this influence affected visual processing areas or non-visual parts of the brain more involved in social understanding.
“Our ability to remember people we have met before is crucial for everyday social interactions,” said study author Tim Andrews, a professor at the University of York. “Previous research in understanding face recognition has primarily focussed on how we remember people based on what their faces look like. Visual experience clearly plays an important role in learning new faces.”
“However, in real life we also learn about people, not just how they look. The potential role of non-visual, conceptual information about a person has often been neglected. This conceptual information includes who a person is (semantic information), how and where we know them (episodic information) and our feelings about them (affective information). Such information could critically contribute to building a rich representation that is important for recognition.”
To explore this, researchers recruited 38 participants and split them into two groups. Both groups watched the same set of video clips from the British TV show Life on Mars, but with a key difference. One group watched the clips in the original order, which preserved the narrative of the episode and allowed viewers to follow the story and learn about the characters. The other group watched the same clips in a scrambled order, disrupting the storyline while keeping the visual exposure identical. This allowed researchers to isolate the effects of conceptual understanding from visual familiarity.
After watching the clips, participants took tests that measured how well they understood what had happened in the video. As expected, those who saw the coherent version scored much higher, confirming that they had formed a richer understanding of the characters and story.
About a month later, both groups returned to the lab for a brain scan using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they watched a new set of clips from the same show. These new scenes featured some of the same characters but did not form a cohesive storyline, ensuring that any differences in brain responses would reflect prior knowledge rather than differences in the new material.
While participants watched the new clips, researchers examined how synchronized their brain activity was using a method called inter-subject correlation. This approach measures how similar the timing of brain responses is across people watching the same video.
In areas of the brain associated with understanding people—like the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and temporal-parietal junction—participants who had seen the original, coherent narrative showed significantly greater synchronization. This suggests that conceptual knowledge about the characters led to more consistent and robust processing of their faces in these regions.
In contrast, traditional face-processing areas in the visual system, such as the fusiform face area and occipital face area, showed no differences between the groups. These regions are usually responsible for analyzing the visual features of faces, and their consistent activity across both groups implies that conceptual knowledge did not affect early perceptual encoding.
“Our main finding was that conceptual knowledge shapes the neural representations of familiar faces in non-visual regions of the brain,” Andrews told PsyPost. “Previous theories have suggested that the ability to recognize faces is a visual process. These findings suggest that it is not just what people look like, but also what we know about them that is important for recognition.”
The researchers also looked at whether brain activity patterns could distinguish between specific characters. They analyzed whether the same character’s face elicited similar brain patterns across different scenes.
In both the visual and non-visual face-processing regions, they found stronger pattern similarity for the same character compared to different characters. But again, the enhancement was most pronounced in non-visual areas—those tied to person knowledge. These effects were more pronounced among participants who had viewed the coherent version of the video, although some patterns were present in both groups.
Importantly, the team ruled out the possibility that these findings were driven by low-level visual similarities between the scenes. They conducted control tests using early visual areas and brain regions not involved in face recognition, such as those that respond to places. These analyses showed that only regions specialized for face and person processing contained identity-specific patterns, and only when viewers had learned meaningful information about the characters.
“We had shown in a previous study (Noad and Andrews, 2024) that associating faces with conceptual knowledge during natural viewing enhances recognition by fostering deeper processing,” Andrews said. “However, the neural level at which this occurs remains unclear. One possibility was that conceptual knowledge strengthens visual representations.”
“However, we found no effects in visual regions of the brain. Alternatively, conceptual knowledge may directly influence non-visual regions involved in processing semantic, episodic and affective information about the person. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found a network of non-visual regions showed significant effects of conceptual knowledge. These findings provide new insights into how real-world learning integrates perceptual and conceptual information, enriching our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying face recognition.”
By using a naturalistic, narrative-rich approach, the study moved beyond previous experiments that often relied on static face images and isolated facts. This approach more closely mirrors how people encounter and learn about others in everyday life, offering new insights into the ways memory, social knowledge, and perception work together during face recognition.
Still, the study had some limitations. The sample size was modest, and while the trends were consistent, some group differences in identity decoding did not reach statistical significance. The use of a specific television show also limits the generalizability of the results. Future research could expand on this by using different types of narratives or testing whether the same effects occur in real-world social interactions.
“Most studies of face recognition have investigated the process in laboratory conditions that often lack ecological validity,” Andrews explained. “Surprisingly little is known about how we learn faces in the real world. To address this issue, we developed a naturalistic approach to understand how learning unfolds in more ecologically valid conditions and over longer time periods. Nonetheless, the time periods used in this study were shorter than those typically encountered in everyday life when we are getting to know people. Future studies should focus on studying the process over longer periods. ”
Despite these caveats, the findings provide evidence that understanding who someone is—beyond how they look—changes how the brain processes their face. The study suggests that memory for faces is not just stored in visual regions but is supported by a broader network of brain areas that link faces with meaning. This research helps explain why we are so good at recognizing people we know, even in changing or difficult viewing conditions: our brains don’t just see a face—they understand the person behind it.
“The overall aim of this research is to reveal the critical importance of conceptual knowledge in the recognition of faces,” Andrews said. “This will help develop new theoretical perspectives on how we recognize faces and to help us understand why some people have difficulty recognizing faces (see Noad, Watson and Andrews, 2024).”
The study, “Conceptual knowledge shapes the neural representations of learned faces in non-visual regions of the brain,” was authored by Kira N. Noad, David M. Watson, and Timothy J. Andrews.
