Dissociable roles of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus and fornix in face and place perception

Abstract

We tested a novel hypothesis, generated from representational accounts of medial temporal lobe (MTL) function, that the major white matter tracts converging on perirhinal cortex (PrC) and hippocampus (HC) would be differentially involved in face and scene perception, respectively. Diffusion tensor imaging was applied in healthy participants alongside an odd-one-out paradigm sensitive to PrC and HC lesions in animals and humans. Microstructure of inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF, connecting occipital and ventro-anterior temporal lobe, including PrC) and fornix (the main HC input/output pathway) correlated with accuracy on odd-one-out judgements involving faces and scenes, respectively. Similarly, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response in PrC and HC, elicited during oddity judgements, was correlated with face and scene oddity performance, respectively. We also observed associations between ILF and fornix microstructure and category-selective BOLD response in PrC and HC, respectively. These striking three-way associations highlight functionally dissociable, structurally instantiated MTL neurocognitive networks for complex face and scene perception.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07902.001

The relationship between socioeconomic status and white matter microstructure in pre‐reading children: A longitudinal investigation

“…The ILF pathway is generally considered a pathway through which information is conveyed from the extrastriate occipital cortex to the lateral temporal cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala (Catani et al ; Schmahmann et al, ). The ILF tract bilaterally has been linked to a range of visual functions such as object recognition, visual learning, and face processing (Catani et al, ; Hodgetts et al, ; Ortibus et al, ; Ross, ). The left ILF, specifically, is a component of the ventral reading pathway that transmits information between the visual word form area (VWFA), located within the fusiform gyrus, and the anterior and medial temporal lobe (Epelbaum et al, ; Wandell et al, ).…”

Functional connectivity in category‐selective brain networks after encoding predicts subsequent memory

“…It is well‐known from monkey tract tracing studies that fusiform cortex provides substantial input to PRC (Suzuki & Naya, ), and multiple lines of research point to the importance of this pathway for object and face memory. In humans, recent work has shown that individual variability in the ability to remember unique faces is associated with the microstructural integrity of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (Gomez et al, ; Hodgetts et al, ; Tavor et al, ; Unger, Alm, Collins, O'Leary, & Olson, ), which connects the fusiform gyrus with the ventral ATLs and PRC (Catani, Jones, Donato, & Ffytche, ; Pyles, Verstynen, Schneider, & Tarr, ).…”

Neurochemical correlates of scene processing in the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex: A multimodal fMRI and 1H‐MRS study

“…The odd‐one‐out task was identical to that used in Shine et al () and Hodgetts et al (). Participants were shown three stimuli from the same visual category on each trial and instructed to select the stimulus that was the “odd‐one‐out” as quickly and as accurately as possible.…”

“…The statistical threshold for the fMRI analysis was voxel‐wise, uncorrected at p < 0.01 (as in Hodgetts et al, ). To prevent false positives due to multiple‐comparisons (as there were approximately 4,000 fMRI voxels within each PCu/PCC MRS metabolite group mask), Monte‐Carlo simulation was used to determine whether the size of any resulting cluster was statistically significant, using the 3dClustSim command in AFNI (2016 version, in which the bug identified in Eklund et al () had been fixed, https://afni.nimh.nih.gov/pub/dist/doc/program_help/3dClustSim.html).…”

“…In this study, therefore, we investigated whether interindividual differences in PCu/PCC activity elicited during complex scene discrimination would be related to interindividual differences in resting state levels of PCu/PCC metabolites. An fMRI odd‐one‐out discrimination paradigm (“oddity”; Hodgetts et al, ; Shine et al, ) was used to investigate PCu/PCC activity in response to different stimulus categories (scenes, faces, objects). First, we hypothesised there would be a greater PCu/PCC BOLD response during scene, compared to face or object, oddity, extending previous findings of a role for PCu/PCC in complex scene cognition to involvement in online perception (Ranganath & Ritchey, ; Spreng et al, ).…”