The nature of face representations in subcortical regions

Gabay, Shai; Burlingham, Charlie S.; Behrmann, Marlene

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.04.010

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…If performance is better when the sequential stimuli are presented to a single eye than when stimuli are presented to different eyes, termed "monocular advantage," we can infer neural processing in the monocular portion of visual pathway mediated by subcortical regions. This monocular vs. dichoptic approach has already yielded interesting findings, revealing, for example, better matching of faces, but not of cars or words, under monocular vs. dichoptic conditions (76,77). Using the same approach, support for subcortical computation has also been uncovered in the domains of perceptual learning (77), spatial attention (78), and multisensory perception (79).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Numerosity representation is encoded in human subcortex

Collins

Park

Behrmann

2017

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

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Certain numerical abilities appear to be relatively ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, including the ability to recognize and differentiate relative quantities. This skill is present in human adults and children, as well as in nonhuman primates and, perhaps surprisingly, is also demonstrated by lower species such as mosquitofish and spiders, despite the absence of cortical computation available to primates. This ubiquity of numerical competence suggests that representations that connect to numerical tasks are likely subserved by evolutionarily conserved regions of the nervous system. Here, we test the hypothesis that the evaluation of relative numerical quantities is subserved by lower-order brain structures in humans. Using a monocular/dichoptic paradigm, across four experiments, we show that the discrimination of displays, consisting of both large (5-80) and small (1-4) numbers of dots, is facilitated in the monocular, subcortical portions of the visual system. This is only the case, however, when observers evaluate larger ratios of 3:1 or 4:1, but not smaller ratios, closer to 1:1. This profile of competence matches closely the skill with which newborn infants and other species can discriminate numerical quantity. These findings suggest conservation of ontogenetically and phylogenetically lower-order systems in adults' numerical abilities. The involvement of subcortical structures in representing numerical quantities provokes a reconsideration of current theories of the neural basis of numerical cognition, inasmuch as it bolsters the crossspecies continuity of the biological system for numerical abilities.subcortex | numerical cognition | vision | development | phylogeny

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Numerosity representation is encoded in human subcortex

Collins

Park

Behrmann

2017

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

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“…One possible mechanism may involve rerouting through the thalamus (Ajina et al, 2015), and subcortical structures may play an important role in reorganizing face recognition, given their role in bootstrapping cortex in the course of face perception in infancy (Johnson, 2005), continued engagement in face perception in adulthood (Gabay et al, 2014), and their phylogenetic role in face perception (Dyer et al, 2005). Another although not mutually exclusive possibility is that because face recognition is so complex and its developmental trajectory is protracted even into early adulthood (Germine et al., 2011), advantage can be taken of the continued growth of the neocortex itself with the addition of myelin, dendritic growth, non-neuronal cells, and a complex process of resculpting synapses present even into adolescence (Bei et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Successful Reorganization of Category-Selective Visual Cortex following Occipito-temporal Lobectomy in Childhood

Nestor

Vida

et al. 2018

Cell Reports

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SUMMARY Investigations of functional (re)organization in children who have undergone large cortical resections offer a unique opportunity to elucidate the nature and extent of cortical plasticity. We report findings from a 3-year investigation of a child, U.D., who underwent surgical removal of the right occipital and posterior temporal lobes at age 6 years 9 months. Relative to controls, post-surgically, U.D. showed age-appropriate intellectual performance and visuoperceptual face and object recognition skills. Using fMRI at five different time points, we observed a persistent hemianopia and no visual field remapping. In category-selective visual cortices, however, object- and scene-selective regions in the intact left hemisphere were stable early on, but regions subserving face and word recognition emerged later and evinced competition for cortical representation. These findings reveal alterations in the selectivity and topography of category-selective regions when confined to a single hemisphere and provide insights into dynamic functional changes in extrastriate cortical architecture.

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“…These subcortical routes might also be involved in the rapid processing of facial expression information (Morris et al, 2001; Tamietto and de Gelder, 2010), and the facial detection of infants with immature cortical visual systems might depend on the subcortical visual system (Johnson, 2005). Furthermore, human neuropsychological studies have reported substantial evidence that suggests that this subcortical pathway is involved in the discrimination of face gender and facial identity (Morris et al, 2001; Khalid et al, 2013; Gabay et al, 2014). Consistently, recent neurophysiological studies have reported that neurons in the monkey SC and pulvinar respond differentially to various photos of human and monkey faces, human facial expressions, and face-like patterns (Maior et al, 2010; Van Le et al, 2013; Nguyen et al, 2013, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population Coding of Facial Information in the Monkey Superior Colliculus and Pulvinar

et al. 2016

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The superior colliculus (SC) and pulvinar are thought to function as a subcortical visual pathway that bypasses the striate cortex and detects fundamental facial information. We previously investigated neuronal responses in the SC and pulvinar of monkeys during a delayed nonmatching-to-sample task, in which the monkeys were required to discriminate among 35 facial photos of five models and other categories of visual stimuli, and reported that population coding by multiple SC and pulvinar neurons well discriminated facial photos from other categories of stimuli (Nguyen et al., 2013, 2014). However, it remains unknown whether population coding could represent multiple types of facial information including facial identity, gender, facial orientation, and gaze direction. In the present study, to investigate population coding of multiple types of facial information by the SC and pulvinar neurons, we reanalyzed the same neuronal responses in the SC and pulvinar; the responses of 112 neurons in the SC and 68 neurons in the pulvinar in serial 50-ms epochs after stimulus onset were reanalyzed with multidimensional scaling (MDS). The results indicated that population coding by neurons in both the SC and pulvinar classified some aspects of facial information, such as face orientation, gender, and identity, of the facial photos in the second epoch (50–100 ms after stimulus onset). The Euclidean distances between all the pairs of stimuli in the MDS spaces in the SC were significantly correlated with those in the pulvinar, which suggested that the SC and pulvinar function as a unit. However, in contrast with the known population coding of face neurons in the temporal cortex, the facial information coding in the SC and pulvinar was coarse and insufficient. In these subcortical areas, identity discrimination was face orientation-dependent and the left and right profiles were not discriminated. Furthermore, gaze direction information was not extracted in the SC and pulvinar. These results suggest that the SC and pulvinar, which comprise the subcortical visual pathway, send coarse and rapid information on faces to the cortical system in a bottom-up process.

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The nature of face representations in subcortical regions

Cited by 28 publications

References 36 publications

Numerosity representation is encoded in human subcortex

Numerosity representation is encoded in human subcortex

Successful Reorganization of Category-Selective Visual Cortex following Occipito-temporal Lobectomy in Childhood

Population Coding of Facial Information in the Monkey Superior Colliculus and Pulvinar

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