A propos des mécanismes neurophysiologiques de la reconnaissance des visages.

During the last three decades, the mechanisms implicated in face perception and recognition, have been investigated with an interdisciplinary approach. On one hand, in psychology, models of cognitive architectures have been developed in which the different kinds of mental operations in the processing of face have been identified. On the other hand, a lot of studies in neuropsychology have analyzed the deficits in visual processing of face, specifically due to lesions or dysfunctions of the central nervous system. Finally, research in neurophysiology (cellular recording in animal and functional cerebral imagery in man) have tried to highlight the complex assembly of cerebral areas implicated in these different operations. Besides a short summary of the principal data collected in this interdisciplinary approach, we present in this contribution results obtained in our laboratory and in the context of an "Action de recherche concertée", in the fields of neuropsychology and cerebral functional imagery.