The pulvinar nuclei appear to function as the subcortical visual pathway that bypasses the striate cortex, detecting fundamental information of face. We recorded neuronal responses from monkey pulvinar during a delayed non-matching-to-sample (DNMS) task, in which monkeys were required to discriminate 5 categories of visual stimuli (photos of human faces, cartoon faces, face-like patterns, eye-like patterns, and simple geometric patterns). Facial stimuli consisted of 35 facial photos (profiles or frontal faces with different gaze directions) of 5 human models. Of 401 neurons recorded, 165 neurons responded differentially to the visual stimuli. Neuronal responses to the 35 facial photos were analyzed by Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. MDS results indicated that the pulvinar neurons could classify some aspects of facial information such as orientation, gender and identity of the models into specific groups. Interestingly, the identities were better discriminated in the frontal faces as compared with the profiles. These results suggest that pulvinar neurons participate in fundamental facal processing and provide neurophysiological evidence for pulvinar involvement in social cognition.