Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: fMRI studies in the mid and late 1990s described an area in \nthe human brain that showed strongly increased blood flow \nin functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments \nwhen people viewed pictures of faces compared to \npictures of objects (1). This seemed to offer an ideal potential \npreparation for tackling the problem of how the brain \nextracts global visual form: a small piece of brain specialized \nto encode a single visual form. Thus, 12 years ago, Winrich \nFreiwald and I began a journey into exploring the neural \nbasis of face processing. We decided to look for a face-selective \narea in macaque monkeys, reasoning that it would \nnot be unreasonable to find such a region in monkeys, since \nface recognition is also integral to macaques—and most \nimportantly, if we did find such a region, then we could \ntarget an electrode to the region (something not possible in \nhumans) and directly record from individual neurons to ask \nhow they are encoding faces. In my talk, I will discuss the \nanatomical and functional organization of the macaque face \nprocessing system, as well as the more recently discovered \nmacaque scene processing system. How are regions within \nthese two systems system connected to each other and the \nrest of the brain? What representations are used in face and \nscene-selective regions? What is the contribution of different \nregions to behavior? What information is communicated \nbetween regions? \n
Author: Doris Y. Tsao
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2617307282