The 54th annual Rosenstiel Award has been conferred on four remarkable neuroscientists who have deciphered how humans and other primates recognize faces.

We perceive faces in ways that differ from other objects, perhaps because they are so important to us. The 2025 Rosenstiel Prize honors Winrich Freiwald, Nancy Kanwisher, Margaret Livingstone, and Doris Tsao for discovering how and where in the brain face recognition occurs. Their studies on this complex and mysterious aspect of perception illuminates brain mechanisms underlying social interaction and cognition.

In 1997, Kanwisher, a Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used fMRI (neuroimaging) to localize a region in the human brain that responded selectively to faces; it was activated more strongly when people were shown pictures of human faces than pictures of other objects. Later, Tsao and Freiwald showed that monkeys have a similar “face region.”

Based on this work, Livingstone, Tsao and Freiwald used fMRI to investigate face areas in greater detail by electrophysiological recording in monkeys. Livingstone was (and remains) a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School; Tsao and Freiwald were postdoctoral fellows in her laboratory. In a pair of groundbreaking papers, they showed that over 95% of the neurons in this small area responded selectively to faces (2006) and that individual cells were tuned to distinct constellations of face parts (2009).

Over the subsequent 15 years, Livingstone, Tsao and Freiwald have continued to explore the properties of the face areas. At present Tsao is a Professor at University of California, Berkeley and Freiwald is a Professor at Rockefeller University in New York.  A key discovery was that the face region comprises six neighboring, interconnected areas, each playing different roles in face recognition.  Another set of studies probed the specific facial features to which neurons are sensitive.  A third used perturbation methods to show that these areas are indeed required for face perception.

Finally, Livingstone and Kanwisher have explored the extent to which the ability to recognize faces is innate or learned, thereby gaining new insight into the age-old nature-nurture question.

Together, these collaborative and collegial studies have linked the activity of specific neurons and brain regions to face perception, epitomizing the ways in which neuroscience can now successfully tackle difficult issues in the ways in which brain function underlies perception and behavior. The work also provides new insights into human development and social interactions.

The Rosenstiel Award will be presented on April 7, 2025, when the four winners will speak about their innovative research.