Perception of Face Parts and Face Configurations: An fMRI Study

By Jia Liu, Alison Harris, Nancy Kanwisher. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2010

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

fMRI studies have reported three regions in human ventral visual cortex that respond selectively to faces: the occipital face area (OFA), the fusiform face area (FFA), and a face-selective region in the superior temporal sulcus (fSTS). Here, we asked whether these areas respond to two first-order aspects of the face argued to be important for face perception, face parts (eyes, nose, and mouth), and the T-shaped spatial configuration of these parts. Specifically, we measured the magnitude of response in these areas to stimuli that (i) either contained real face parts, or did not, and (ii) either had veridical face configurations, or did not. The OFA and the fSTS were sensitive only to the presence of real face parts, not to the correct configuration of those parts, whereas the FFA was sensitive to both face parts and face configuration. Further, only in the FFA was the response to configuration and part information correlated across voxels, suggesting that the FFA contains a unified representation that includes both kinds of information. In combination with prior results from fMRI, TMS, MEG, and patient studies, our data illuminate the functional division of labor in the OFA, FFA, and fSTS.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/267a678318676c98a0ae22f3eb07e3fea09f5919

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. C. Cavina-Pratesi
2. E. T. Rolls
3. A. Milner
4. Robert W. Kentridge
5. C. Heywood
6. Morten L. Kringelbach
7. Gustavo Deco
8. Fabian Grabenhorst

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

1. C. Cavina-Pratesi
2. E. T. Rolls
3. A. Milner
4. Robert W. Kentridge
5. C. Heywood

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. E. T. Rolls
2. A. Milner
3. Morten L. Kringelbach
4. Kent C. Berridge

Citations in the corpus

• Invariant Visual Object and Face Recognition: Neural and Computational Bases, and a Model, VisNet (2012, background): “Consistent evidence for face part configuration sensitivity has been found in human fMRI studies (Liu et al., 2010).”
• Separate channels for processing form, texture, and color: evidence from FMRI adaptation and visual object agnosia. (2010, background): “Similarly, when asked to discriminate faces, observers do not use only shape (local/global, Schiltz and Rossion 2006; Liu et al. 2010) but rely also on surface features such as skin color and pigmentation (Bruce and Langton 1994; Vuong et al. 2005; Nestor and Tarr 2008).”