The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception

By Nancy Kanwisher, J. McDermott, Marvin M. Chun. 1997

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found an area in the fusiform gyrus in 12 of the 15 subjects tested that was significantly more active when the subjects viewed faces than when they viewed assorted common objects. This face activation was used to define a specific region of interest individually for each subject, within which several new tests of face specificity were run. In each of five subjects tested, the predefined candidate “face area” also responded significantly more strongly to passive viewing of (1) intact than scrambled two-tone faces, (2) full front-view face photos than front-view photos of houses, and (in a different set of five subjects) (3) three-quarter-view face photos (with hair concealed) than photos of human hands; it also responded more strongly during (4) a consecutive matching task performed on three-quarter-view faces versus hands. Our technique of running multiple tests applied to the same region defined functionally within individual subjects provides a solution to two common problems in functional imaging: (1) the requirement to correct for multiple statistical comparisons and (2) the inevitable ambiguity in the interpretation of any study in which only two or three conditions are compared. Our data allow us to reject alternative accounts of the function of the fusiform face area (area “FF”) that appeal to visual attention, subordinate-level classification, or general processing of any animate or human forms, demonstrating that this region is selectively involved in the perception of faces.

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “Consistent with this suggestion, a recent study found that although the majority of voxels in the fusiform face area (FFA, Kanwisher et al., 1997; Kanwisher, 2010) was suppressed for a repeated face, a subset of voxels reliably showed the reverse pattern (de Gardelle et al., 2013), termed…”
Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (2016, background): “Progressing along the what or where pathway, there is a gradual shift in the nature of connectivity: receptive field sizes increase, and spatial organization becomes looser until there is no obvious retinotopic organization; the loss of retinotopy means that single neurons respond to objects such as”
Toward an Integration of Deep Learning and Neuroscience (2016, background): “…it is still unknown why a clustered spatial pattern of representational categories arises, e.g., a physically localized “area” that seems to correspond to representations of faces (Kanwisher et al., 1997), another area for representations of visual word forms (McCandliss et al., 2003), and so on.”
A cortical representation of the local visual environment (1998, methodology): “Standard imaging procedures were used (TR, 2 s; TE, 70 ms; flip angle, 90° 180° offset, 25 ms) and have been describe”
Encoding and decoding in fMRI (2010, background): “They found that object category could be decoded from voxel activity in ventral temporal cortex, even when activity from object-specific modules (e.g., the fusiform face area; Kanwisher et al., 1997) were excluded from the analysis.”
The neural basis of visual body perception (2007, background): “The FBA is adjacent to and partly overlaps the face-selective fusiform face area (FFA”
THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF WORKING MEMORY (2007, methodology): “For fMRI, we used an independent functional localizer to identify both stimulusselective face regions (within the fusiform face area or FFA; Kanwisher et al. 1997) and scene regions (within the parahippocampal place area or PPA; Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998).”
The Domain of Organizational Cognitive Neuroscience (2012, background): “Take, for example, the early work on face perception (as one example of an adaptive social skill) that revealed a “dedicated” region in the ventral surface of the cortex to be implicated in its perception (Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997).”