Selectivity for the Human Body in the Fusiform Gyrus

Peelen, Marius V.; Downing, Paul E.

doi:10.1152/jn.00513.2004

Cited by 604 publications

(530 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Tsao and colleagues (22) have proposed in a related monkey fMRI study that the face area in the posterior STS may be homologous to the human FFA. However, the human FFA has been shown to respond differentially to faces and human bodies (39), whereas the pFace area that we identified in the macaque did not discriminate monkey faces and body parts.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 73%

Representations of faces and body parts in macaque temporal cortex: A functional MRI study

Pinsk

DeSimone

Moore

et al. 2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

259

179

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Human neuroimaging studies suggest that areas in temporal cortex respond preferentially to certain biologically relevant stimulus categories such as faces and bodies. Single-cell studies in monkeys have reported cells in inferior temporal cortex that respond selectively to faces, hands, and bodies but provide little evidence of large clusters of category-specific cells that would form ''areas.'' We probed the category selectivity of macaque temporal cortex for representations of monkey faces and monkey body parts relative to man-made objects using functional MRI in animals trained to fixate. Two face-selective areas were activated bilaterally in the posterior and anterior superior temporal sulcus exhibiting different degrees of category selectivity. The posterior face area was more extensively activated in the right hemisphere than in the left hemisphere. Immediately adjacent to the face areas, regions were activated bilaterally responding preferentially to body parts. Our findings suggest a category-selective organization for faces and body parts in macaque temporal cortex.non-human primate ͉ visual category representations H uman and non-human primates have a remarkable ability to recognize a large variety of different objects in their environments. In humans, neuroimaging studies have shown that object information is represented in a large swath of ventral temporal and lateral occipital cortex that is characterized by stronger responses to objects than to non-objects (1, 2). Within these object-selective activations, discrete regions have been identified that respond preferentially to some biologically relevant stimulus categories such as faces [the ''fusiform face area,'' FFA (3-6)] or bodies [the ''extrastriate body area,'' EBA (7)], suggesting a category-specific and anatomically segregated modular organization of neural representations related to certain classes of object stimuli. These studies are consistent with reports of patients with lesions of temporooccipital cortex, who show selective impairments in recognizing familiar faces [prosopagnosia (8)] or body parts (9) but not other objects.In the macaque, much less is known about the large-scale representation of object information. Single-cell physiology studies have shown that neurons in inferior temporal (IT) cortex typically respond to complex stimuli with some selectivity for shape, color, and texture (10, 11). A small proportion of IT neurons were found to respond selectively to faces (10-16), hands (14, 17), or human bodies (18). These neurons were more common in the portion of cytoarchitectonic area TE on the ventral bank of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and in the superior polysensory area on the dorsal bank of the STS. They were also found on the lateral and ventral surfaces of area TE. Even though face-selective neurons were found clustered together, or sometimes even formed columns (19,20), there was no evidence for an organization into face-or body-selective areas in monkey IT cortex, similar to the human FFA or EBA.However, this vie...

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 73%

Representations of faces and body parts in macaque temporal cortex: A functional MRI study

Pinsk

DeSimone

Moore

et al. 2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

259

179

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…As expected, given the part -whole relation between bodies and faces, the results showed that the middle part of the FG, which is typically associated with the perception of facial identity, is more activated for bodies than for faces (van de Riet et al 2009). Previous studies have shown that there was partial overlap between the face-selective and body-selective region within the FG (Hadjikhani & de Gelder 2003;Peelen & Downing 2005). In fact, viewing whole-body expressions elicited a wider network of brain areas compared with faces, including other areas previously associated with perception of facial expressions, such as STS.…”

Section: Investigations Of Bodies Will Extend the Scope Of Face-basedsupporting

confidence: 81%

Why bodies? Twelve reasons for including bodily expressions in affective neuroscience

Gelder

2009

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

376

251

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Why bodies? It is rather puzzling that given the massive interest in affective neuroscience in the last decade, it still seems to make sense to raise the question 'Why bodies' and to try to provide an answer to it, as is the goal of this article. There are now hundreds of articles on human emotion perception ranging from behavioural studies to brain imaging experiments. These experimental studies complement decades of reports on affective disorders in neurological patients and clinical studies of psychiatric populations. The most cursory glance at the literature on emotion in humans, now referred to by the umbrella term of social and affective neuroscience, shows that over 95 per cent of them have used faces as stimuli. Of the remaining 5 per cent, a few have used scenes or auditory information including human voices, music or environmental sounds. But by far the smallest number has looked into whole-body expressions. As a rough estimate, a search on PubMed today, 1 May 2009, yields 3521 hits for emotion Â faces, 1003 hits for emotion Â music and 339 hits for emotion Â bodies. When looking in more detail, the body Â emotion category in fact yields a majority of papers on well-being, nursing, sexual violence or organ donation. But the number of cognitive and affective neuroscience studies of emotional body perception as of today is lower than 20.Why then have whole bodies and bodily expressions not attracted the attention of researchers so far? The goal of this article is to contribute some elements for an answer to this question. I believe that there is something to learn from the historical neglect of bodies and bodily expressions. I will next address some historical misconceptions about whole-body perception, and in the process I intend not only to provide an impetus for this kind of work but also to contribute to a better understanding of the significance of the affective dimension of behaviour, mind and brain as seen from the vantage point of bodily communication. Subsequent sections discuss available evidence for the neurofunctional basis of facial and bodily expressions as well as neuropsychological and clinical studies of bodily expressions.

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“…Third, the 'FFA' was defined as a large square ROI, over a centimetre on a side, a method that guarantees the inclusion of voxels neighbouring but not in the FFA. Thus, it is possible, for example, that any training effects on Greebles may arise from the body-selective 'fusiform body area' (FBA; Peelen & Downing 2005;Schwarzlose et al 2005) which is adjacent to the FFA (see §3e) rather than from the FFA itself. Finally, 'activation' was defined as the sum across the 64 voxels in the ROI of t-values resulting from a comparison of upright to inverted responses within each voxel (after excluding all t-values less than 0.1).…”

Section: Evidence From Fmri: Functional Specificity Of the Ffamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kanwisher

Yovel

2006

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

1,444

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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Selectivity for the Human Body in the Fusiform Gyrus

Cited by 604 publications

References 34 publications

Representations of faces and body parts in macaque temporal cortex: A functional MRI study

Representations of faces and body parts in macaque temporal cortex: A functional MRI study

Why bodies? Twelve reasons for including bodily expressions in affective neuroscience

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

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