Expert face processing requires visual input to the right hemisphere during infancy

Grand, Richard Le; Mondloch, Catherine J.; Maurer, Daphne; Brent, Henry P.

doi:10.1038/nn1121

Cited by 307 publications

(205 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…But it is possible that the social deficit and the perceptual disorder work in tandem: the lack of experience and the inadequate attention to faces may limit the acquisition of the normal configural perceptual skill. Consistent with the claim that expertise comes to fine-tune or optimize the fusiform gyrus (FG), the putative 'face area', as a function of experience with a class of stimuli (Gauthier et al, submitted for publicationGauthier, Tarr, Anderson, Skudlarski, & Gore, 1999;Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2003), the fusiform region of autistic individuals does not apparently come to respond preferentially to faces and this hypoactivation may be a direct reflection of the social disability (Schultz, 2005;Schultz et al, 2003). Some, although not all, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown reduced activation of the FG of autistic individuals when viewing faces; instead strong activation is noted in the inferior temporal gyrus region, the region activated during object discrimination in controls (Grelotti et al, 2005;Hubl et al, 2003;Pierce et al, 2004Pierce et al, , 2001Schultz et al, 2000).…”

Section: Preference For Local Information In Autismmentioning

confidence: 89%

Configural processing in autism and its relationship to face processing

et al. 2006

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Studies of the perceptual performance of individuals with autism have focused, to a large extent, on two domains of visual behavior, one associated with face processing and the other associated with global or holistic processing. Whether autistic individuals differ from neurotypical individuals in these domains is debatable and, moreover, the relationship between the behaviors in these two domains remains unclear. We first compared the face processing ability of 14 adult individuals with autism with that of neurotypical controls and showed that the autistic individuals were slowed in their speed of face discrimination. We then showed that the two groups differed in their ability to derive the global whole in two different tasks, one using hierarchical compound letters and the other using a microgenetic primed matching task with geometric shapes, with the autistic group showing a bias in favor of local information. A significant correlation was also observed between performance on the face task and the configural tasks. We then confirmed the prediction that the ability to derive the global whole is not only critical for faces but also for other objects as well, as the autistic individuals performed more slowly than the control group in discriminating between objects. Taken together, the results suggest that the bias for local processing seen in autistic individuals might have an adverse impact on their ability to process faces and objects.

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Section: Preference For Local Information In Autismmentioning

confidence: 89%

Configural processing in autism and its relationship to face processing

et al. 2006

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“…Thus, pattern vision in the first few months of life is necessary for the development of normal face processing as an adult; years of subsequent visual experience with faces is not sufficient. Most intriguingly, it is early deprivation of input specifically to the right hemisphere that leads to adult impairments in face processing in these individuals; early deprivation of visual input to the left hemisphere does not (Le Grand et al 2003). Thus, although these investigations point to a critical role of experience in the construction or maintenance of face-processing mechanisms, this experience must be directed to a specific anatomical target (the right hemisphere) and must occur very early in development.…”

Section: Open Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces

Kanwisher

Yovel

2006

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

1,447

989

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Faces are among the most important visual stimuli we perceive, informing us not only about a person's identity, but also about their mood, sex, age and direction of gaze. The ability to extract this information within a fraction of a second of viewing a face is important for normal social interactions and has probably played a critical role in the survival of our primate ancestors. Considerable evidence from behavioural, neuropsychological and neurophysiological investigations supports the hypothesis that humans have specialized cognitive and neural mechanisms dedicated to the perception of faces (the face-specificity hypothesis). Here, we review the literature on a region of the human brain that appears to play a key role in face perception, known as the fusiform face area (FFA).Section 1 outlines the theoretical background for much of this work. The face-specificity hypothesis falls squarely on one side of a longstanding debate in the fields of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience concerning the extent to which the mind/brain is composed of: (i) special-purpose ('domain-specific') mechanisms, each dedicated to processing a specific kind of information (e.g. faces, according to the face-specificity hypothesis), versus (ii) general-purpose ('domain-general') mechanisms, each capable of operating on any kind of information. Face perception has long served both as one of the prime candidates of a domain-specific process and as a key target for attack by proponents of domain-general theories of brain and mind. Section 2 briefly reviews the prior literature on face perception from behaviour and neurophysiology. This work supports the face-specificity hypothesis and argues against its domain-general alternatives (the individuation hypothesis, the expertise hypothesis and others).Section 3 outlines the more recent evidence on this debate from brain imaging, focusing particularly on the FFA. We review the evidence that the FFA is selectively engaged in face perception, by addressing (and rebutting) five of the most widely discussed alternatives to this hypothesis. In §4, we consider recent findings that are beginning to provide clues into the computations conducted in the FFA and the nature of the representations the FFA extracts from faces. We argue that the FFA is engaged both in detecting faces and in extracting the necessary perceptual information to recognize them, and that the properties of the FFA mirror previously identified behavioural signatures of face-specific processing (e.g. the face-inversion effect).Section 5 asks how the computations and representations in the FFA differ from those occurring in other nearby regions of cortex that respond strongly to faces and objects. The evidence indicates clear functional dissociations between these regions, demonstrating that the FFA shows not only functional specificity but also area specificity. We end by speculating in §6 on some of the broader questions raised by current research on the FFA, including the developmental origins of this region and the ques...

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“…The trial order was randomised within orientation blocks (part-whole) but the block order was fixed (orientation). In fixing the block order, we followed previous studies that have begun with upright face trials to maximise the ecological validity of the face recognition task, and blocked orientation to allow children to develop recognition strategies for each orientation (e.g., LeGrand et al, 2003;Mondloch et al, 2002;Yovel & Kanwisher, in press). A fixed order of blocks risks confounding orientation effects with order effects in the results, for example, if there is poorer performance on later blocks through tiredness.…”

Section: Try To Answer As Fast As Possible"mentioning

confidence: 99%