Evidence for integrated visual face and body representations in the anterior temporal lobes
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Research on visual face perception has revealed a region in the ventral anterior
temporal lobes, often referred to as the anterior temporal face patch (ATFP), which
responds strongly to images of faces. To date, the selectivity of the ATFP has been
examined by contrasting responses to faces against a small selection of categories.
Here, we assess the selectivity of the ATFP in humans with a broad range of visual
control stimuli to provide a stronger test of face selectivity in this region. In
Experiment 1, participants viewed images from 20 stimulus categories in an eventrelated
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design. Faces evoked more
activity than all other 19 categories in the left ATFP. In the right ATFP, equally
strong responses were observed for both faces and headless bodies. To pursue this
unexpected finding, in Experiment 2 we used multi-voxel pattern analysis to examine
whether the strong response to face and body stimuli reflects a common coding of
both classes, or instead overlapping but distinct representations. On a voxel-by-voxel
basis, face and whole-body responses were significantly positively correlated in right
ATFP, but face and body-part responses were not. This finding suggests there is
shared neural coding of faces and whole-bodies in right ATFP that does not extend to
individual body parts. In contrast, the same approach revealed distinct face and body
representations in the right fusiform gyrus. These results are indicative of an
increasing convergence of distinct sources of person-related perceptual information
proceeding from the posterior to the anterior temporal cortex.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1178-1193 |
Journal | Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 8 |
Early online date | 22 Jun 2016 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Aug 2016 |