Differences in neural responses to ipsilateral stimuli in wide-view fields between face- and house-selective areas

Abstract

Category-selective brain areas exhibit varying levels of neural activity to ipsilaterally presented stimuli. However, in face- and house-selective areas, the neural responses evoked by ipsilateral stimuli in the peripheral visual field remain unclear. In this study, we displayed face and house images using a wide-view visual presentation system while performing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The face-selective areas (fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA)) exhibited intense neural responses to ipsilaterally presented images, whereas the house-selective areas (parahippocampal place area (PPA) and transverse occipital sulcus (TOS)) exhibited substantially smaller and even negative neural responses to the ipsilaterally presented images. We also found that the category preferences of the contralateral and ipsilateral neural responses were similar. Interestingly, the face- and house-selective areas exhibited neural responses to ipsilateral images that were smaller than the responses to the contralateral images. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was implemented to evaluate the difference between the contralateral and ipsilateral responses. The classification accuracies were much greater than those expected by chance. The classification accuracies in the FFA were smaller than those in the PPA and TOS. The closer eccentricities elicited greater classification accuracies in the PPA and TOS. We propose that these ipsilateral neural responses might be interpreted by interhemispheric communication through intrahemispheric connectivity of white matter connection and interhemispheric connectivity via the corpus callosum and occipital white matter connection. Furthermore, the PPA and TOS likely have weaker interhemispheric communication than the FFA and OFA, particularly in the peripheral visual field.

Peripheral visual field loss and activities of daily living

“…Although visual impairment in general is associated with reduced socialization [18], patients with central visual loss and impaired face recognition had self-reported difficulty not only in recognizing others, but consequent feelings of guilt, failure, and ultimately social avoidance [25]. Visual association areas in the ventral occipital temporal cortex (VOTC – the FFA and OFA) specialize in face recognition and processing [54] and show increases in activity on fMRI when a facial image is presented in the ipsilateral peripheral VF [55]. Thus, peripheral field involvement in face perception may be more important than previously believed, as its role in face recognition and characterization is inadequately understood.…”

“…Low spatial frequency (LSF) processing of broad information [68] is carried by magnocellular pathways, corresponding to the peripheral VF [69], while high spatial frequency (HSF) input of the fine details of a scene [68] is carried by the parvocellular pathways from the central VF [69]. Neuroimaging studies have shown that peripheral vision is more important than central vision for categorization of different natural scenes [70,71], with scene categorization tasks shown in the periphery resulting in significant activation of the PPA and transverse occipital sulcus (TOS) in a retinotopic manner [55].…”