Anatomical connectivity patterns predict face-selectivity in the fusiform gyrus

By Zeynep M. Saygin, David E. Osher, Kami Koldewyn, G. Reynolds, John D. E. Gabrieli, Rebecca Saxe. Nature Neuroscience, 2011

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A fundamental assumption in neuroscience is that brain structure determines function. Accordingly, functionally distinct regions of cortex should be structurally distinct in their connections to other areas. We tested this hypothesis in relation to face selectivity in the fusiform gyrus. By using only structural connectivity, as measured through diffusion-weighted imaging, we were able to predict functional activation to faces in the fusiform gyrus. These predictions outperformed two control models and a standard group-average benchmark. The structure–function relationship discovered from the initial participants was highly robust in predicting activation in a second group of participants, despite differences in acquisition parameters and stimuli. This approach can thus reliably estimate activation in participants who cannot perform functional imaging tasks and is an alternative to group-activation maps. Additionally, we identified cortical regions whose connectivity was highly influential in predicting face selectivity within the fusiform, suggesting a possible mechanistic architecture underlying face processing in humans.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0e697d6a2fea53422e874970887dbd0ec766efe

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Citations in the corpus

The human connectome: Origins and challenges (2013, background): “In addition to predicting resting brain fluctuations, the connectional “fingerprint” of cortical regions can also accurately predict functional brain responses in individual participants, as shown for face-specific activation patterns in the fusiform gyrus (Saygin et al., 2011).”
How Visual Is the Visual Cortex? Comparing Connectional and Functional Fingerprints between Congenitally Blind and Sighted Individuals (2015, result): “…functional profile in a brain region is driven by the functional/structural connectivity pattern of this region (Passingham et al., 2002; Mahon and Caramazza, 2009, 2011; Saygin et al., 2012), we directly compared the between-group similarity maps of category response patterns and RSFC patterns.”
Task-free MRI Predicts Individual Differences in Brain Activity During Task Performance (2016, unknown): “MOTOR Hand, foot, tongue movements [10] CUE [11] LF [12] LH [13] RF [14] RH [15] T [16] AVG [17] CUE-AVG [18] LFAVG [19] LH-AVG [20] RF-AVG [21] RH-AVG [22] T-AVG”
Structural foundations of resting-state and task-based functional connectivity in the human brain (2013, background): “Previous structure-function studies have been limited to specific brain regions, small sample sizes, and restingstate activity (8, 9, 13) for which it is difficult to reliably assess the differential contributions of several structural measures to taskdependent function.”
The Human Brainnetome Atlas: A New Brain Atlas Based on Connectional Architecture (2016, unknown): “For example, a recent study predictedwhich parts of the fusiform gyrus are involved in face recognition based on structural connectivity patterns (Saygin et al. 2012).”