Separate face and body selectivity on the fusiform gyrus.

Recent reports of a high response to bodies in the fusiform face area (FFA) challenge the idea that the FFA is exclusively selective for face stimuli. We examined this claim by conducting a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment at both standard (3.125 x 3.125 x 4.0 mm) and high resolution (1.4 x 1.4 x 2.0 mm). In both experiments, regions of interest (ROIs) were defined using data from blocked localizer runs. Within each ROI, we measured the mean peak response to a variety of stimulus types in independent data from a subsequent event-related experiment. Our localizer scans identified a fusiform body area (FBA), a body-selective region reported recently by Peelen and Downing (2005) that is anatomically distinct from the extrastriate body area. The FBA overlapped with and was adjacent to the FFA in all but two participants. Selectivity of the FFA to faces and FBA to bodies was stronger for the high-resolution scans, as expected from the reduction in partial volume effects. When new ROIs were constructed for the high-resolution experiment by omitting the voxels showing overlapping selectivity for both bodies and faces in the localizer scans, the resulting FFA* ROI showed no response above control objects for body stimuli, and the FBA* ROI showed no response above control objects for face stimuli. These results demonstrate strong selectivities in distinct but adjacent regions in the fusiform gyrus for only faces in one region (the FFA*) and only bodies in the other (the FBA*).

[1]  T. Allison,et al.  Human extrastriate visual cortex and the perception of faces, words, numbers, and colors. , 1994, Cerebral cortex.

[2]  R. Malach,et al.  Object-related activity revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging in human occipital cortex. , 1995, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[3]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception , 1997, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[4]  T. Allison,et al.  Electrophysiological studies of human face perception. III: Effects of top-down processing on face-specific potentials. , 1999, Cerebral cortex.

[5]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  The fusiform face area is selective for faces not animals. , 1999, Neuroreport.

[6]  R W Cox,et al.  Real‐time 3D image registration for functional MRI , 1999, Magnetic resonance in medicine.

[7]  L L Chao,et al.  Are face-responsive regions selective only for faces? , 1999, Neuroreport.

[8]  M. Tarr,et al.  Activation of the middle fusiform 'face area' increases with expertise in recognizing novel objects , 1999, Nature Neuroscience.

[9]  I. Gauthier,et al.  Expertise for cars and birds recruits brain areas involved in face recognition , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[10]  T Yamamoto,et al.  Selective impairment of facial recognition due to a haematoma restricted to the right fusiform and lateral occipital region , 2001, Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry.

[11]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  A Cortical Area Selective for Visual Processing of the Human Body , 2001, Science.

[12]  A. Ishai,et al.  Distributed and Overlapping Representations of Faces and Objects in Ventral Temporal Cortex , 2001, Science.

[13]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  How Distributed Is Visual Category Information in Human Occipito-Temporal Cortex? An fMRI Study , 2002, Neuron.

[14]  R. Blake,et al.  Brain Areas Active during Visual Perception of Biological Motion , 2002, Neuron.

[15]  N. Hadjikhani,et al.  Seeing Fearful Body Expressions Activates the Fusiform Cortex and Amygdala , 2003, Current Biology.

[16]  Doris Y. Tsao,et al.  Faces and objects in macaque cerebral cortex , 2003, Nature Neuroscience.

[17]  Charles Pelizzari,et al.  Transient Inability to Distinguish Between Faces: Electrophysiologic Studies , 2003, Journal of clinical neurophysiology : official publication of the American Electroencephalographic Society.

[18]  P. Skudlarski,et al.  The role of the fusiform face area in social cognition: implications for the pathobiology of autism. , 2003, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[19]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  The fusiform face area subserves face perception, not generic within-category identification , 2004, Nature Neuroscience.

[20]  John T. Clark,et al.  Contextually Evoked Object-Specific Responses in Human Visual Cortex , 2004 .

[21]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  Numerical Magnitude in the Human Parietal Lobe Tests of Representational Generality and Domain Specificity , 2004, Neuron.

[22]  B. Argall,et al.  Unraveling multisensory integration: patchy organization within human STS multisensory cortex , 2004, Nature Neuroscience.

[23]  C. Gross,et al.  Representations of faces and body parts in macaque temporal cortex: a functional MRI study. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[24]  P. Downing,et al.  Selectivity for the human body in the fusiform gyrus. , 2005, Journal of neurophysiology.

[25]  Yaoda Xu.  Revisiting the role of the fusiform face area in visual expertise. , 2005, Cerebral cortex.