While the role of posterior temporal regions in face recognition has been largely demonstrated, the importance of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is still underestimated, especially because fMRI suffers from a signal dropout in this region. A recent intracranial case study by Jonas et al. (2015) has shown that electrical stimulation of the right anterior fusiform gyrus elicited a transient inability to recognize faces. However, because only naming tasks were used, it was hard to distinguish between a face-specific impairment or a naming/semantic deficit.

Here we report the case of a patient (DN) who was implanted with SEEG electrodes in the right ATL.

During electrical stimulation, DN was asked to perform famous face and name pointing tasks, which did not require verbal outputs and allowed the direct comparison between two different types of famous stimuli (faces and names).

Following electrical stimulation of the right anterior fusiform gyrus, DN was unable to point the famous face among 2 unfamiliar face distractors. Interestingly, stimulation at these critical contacts did not affect the detection of a famous name among 2 unfamiliar name distractors. Moreover, significant intracerebral face-selective responses and responses to famous faces were found at the critical contacts of stimulation using paradigms of fast periodic visual stimulation.

Altogether, these findings suggest that the transient inability to recognize famous faces following electrical stimulation of the right anterior fusiform gyrus is specific to face stimuli and provide new evidence for the role of this region in familiar face recognition.