For many years, a dominant view in neuroscience was that neurons in the inferotemporal (IT) cortex—a critical center in the brain for the recognition of objects—represent the world through fixed tuning functions. Doris Tsao (BS '96), who has been studying how the brain processes visual information for her entire career, believed this to be a fact. But now, with a team of other scientists that includes recent Caltech graduate Yuelin Shi (PhD '26), she has found evidence that the opposite is true. In a recently published paper in Nature , the team shows that neurons in the IT cortex rapidly switch from a neural code that supports face detection to one optimized for face identification—all within roughly 20 milliseconds after a face is viewed. The results suggest a previously unrecognized neural mechanism that may help explain how the brain flexibly extracts different kinds of information from an image.…