> How were they able to achieve such perfect recreation from monkey
Because the macaque study didn't decode faces from fMRI. They first used fMRI to locate the face patches, then used tungsten microelectrodes for single-unit electrophysiology to record spikes from individual face-selective neurons in ML/MF and AM. [0]
Single-unit recordings capture individual spike patterns at a resolution fMRI, which averages across hundreds of thousands of neurons per voxel, simply cannot provide.
Because the macaque study didn't decode faces from fMRI. They first used fMRI to locate the face patches, then used tungsten microelectrodes for single-unit electrophysiology to record spikes from individual face-selective neurons in ML/MF and AM. [0]
Single-unit recordings capture individual spike patterns at a resolution fMRI, which averages across hundreds of thousands of neurons per voxel, simply cannot provide.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8088389