Regular articleThe functionally defined right occipital and fusiform “face areas” discriminate novel from visually familiar faces
Introduction
Understanding how the human brain perceives and recognizes faces has become one of the most exciting and debated areas of research in cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Kanwisher 2000, Haxby et al 2000, Tarr and Gauthier 2000. Pursuing this general goal, neuroimaging studies have localized a set of brain areas in the human visual extrastriate cortex that respond more during the presentation of faces than to other object categories. These areas are located mainly in the middle lateral fusiform gyrus (the fusiform face area (FFA), Kanwisher et al., 1997), and in the inferior occipital gyrus (infOg, occipital face area (OFA), e.g., Halgren et al., 1999), with a right hemisphere advantage. Being located beyond the retinotopic striate and extrastriate visual cortices, the exact anatomical borders of these regions cannot be defined with respect to other visual areas (Halgren et al., 1999). Accordingly, their localization is based on functional criteria, i.e., a significantly larger response for pictures of faces than other objects (Kanwisher et al., 1997). An important and unresolved issue is whether the face areas are involved in perceptual aspects of face processing only, helping to discriminate between faces and other object categories (“face detection,” Tong et al., 2000) or between different unfamiliar faces (Gauthier et al., 2000), or if they also contribute to presemantic face recognition, i.e., the discrimination between a face previously seen and a novel face. Despite the computational complexity of this task, humans are particularly efficient at it, even when the “familiar” face has been encountered just once, months or years ago (Bruce and Young, 1998). Because recognizing familiar faces and encoding new faces in memory appear to be the primary functions of the face processing system, it would be surprising that the areas forming the core of the face processing system (Haxby et al., 2000) do not play any role in these functions. In addition, the inability to recognize and encode faces in memory is exactly what defines prosopagnosia—a deficit usually observed following lesions of the occipitotemporal cortex—but these patients do not usually present difficulties at discriminating faces from other object categories (e.g., Bruyer et al., 1983).
In healthy humans, the processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces has been compared in a number of imaging experiments Haxby et al 2000, Henson et al 2000, Henson et al 2002, George et al 1999, Gorno-Tempini et al 1998, Gorno-Tempini and Price 2001, Katanoda et al 2000, Leveroni et al 2000, Rossion et al 2001, Sergent et al 1992, Wiser et al 2000, but none of these studies tested the hypothesis that the exact same functional regions that respond more to faces than to other object categories, are also involved in familiar vs novel face discrimination. In addition, in the previous literature, there are a number of task and stimuli confounds that prevent a straightforward interpretation of activation differences produced by familiar and unfamiliar faces in visual areas (see Rossion et al., 2001).
Here, we tested the hypothesis that the functionally defined face areas differentiate between visually familiar and novel faces, using a multistudy analysis of the data of two previously reported PET experiments Rossion et al 2000a, Rossion et al 2001 carried out on the same eight male subjects. The data from the first study (Rossion et al., 2000a) were used to functionally define the areas responding significantly more to faces than to objects in this group of subjects, and these regions were then tested for familiar/unfamiliar face differences in the same subjects scanned later.
Section snippets
Participants
Eight right-handed adult male subjects (age range: 22–25) took part in both PET studies, the two scanning sessions being performed at 4 to 6 weeks interval time.
Stimuli
Details of stimulation can be found in Rossion et al. (2000a) for the localizer task, and in Rossion et al. (2001) for the familiar/unfamiliar face comparisons. In the first study (localizer task), subjects underwent 12 scans, half of them with presentations of faces, and the other half with objects. In the second study, 30 novel
Discussion
The main conclusion of our multistudy analysis is that the functionally defined right fusiform face area and also the right occipital face area, at a lower level, are involved in the discrimination of familiar from unfamiliar individual faces. These results complement our previous study (Rossion et al., 2001), in which we identified a network of visual areas activated by faces compared to a baseline resting condition and modulated by visual familiarity of the faces. In that study, the
Acknowledgements
Bruno Rossion is supported by the National Funds for Scientific Research (Belgium). This work was supported by grant FRSM 3.4520.98 and grant ARC ARC 01/06-267 (Communauté Française de Belgique—Actions de Recherche Concertées). We thank two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions on a previous version of this manuscript.
References (43)
- et al.
Analysis of the neuronal selectivity underlying low fMRI signals
Curr. Biol.
(2002) - et al.
A case of prosopagnosia with some preserved covert remembrance of familiar faces
Brain Cogn.
(1983) - et al.
Effect of familiarity on the processing of human faces
Neuroimage
(1999) Event-related brain potentials distinguish processing stages involved in face perception and recognition
Clin. Neurophysiol.
(2000)- et al.
The distributed human neural system for face perception
Trends Cogni. Sci.
(2000) - et al.
Neural substrates for the recognition of newly learned facesa functional MRI study
Neuropsychologia
(2000) - et al.
Cognitive conjunctiona new approach to brain activation experiments
Neuroimage
(1997) - Barton, J.J., Cherkasova, M.V., Press, D.Z., Intriligator, J.M., O’Conor, M., 2003. Perceptual functions in...
- et al.
Electrophysiological studies of face perception in humans
J. Cogn. Neurosci.
(1996) - et al.
In the Eye of the BeholderThe Science of Face Perception
(1998)
Prosopagnosiaanatomic basis and behavioral mechanisms
Neurology
Repetition priming and face processing priming occur within the system that responds to the identity of a face
Q. J. Exp. Psychol. A
Visual AgnosiaDisorders of Object Recognition and What They Tell Us About Normal Vision
Enhanced detection of focal brain response using intersubject averaging and change-distribution analysis of subtracted PET images
J. Cereb. Blood Flow Metab.
Statistical parametric maps in functional imaginga general linear approach
Hum. Brain Mapp.
Activation of the middle fusiform area increases with expertise in recognizing novel objects
Nat. Neurosci.
The fusiform “face area” is part of a network that processes faces at the individual level
J. Cogn. Neurosci.
Contrast polarity and face recognition in the human fusiform gyrus
Nat. Neurosci.
The neural systems sustaining face and proper name processing
Brain
Identification of famous faces and buildings—a functional neuroimaging study of semantically unique items
Brain
Location of human face-selective cortex with respect to retinotopic areas
Hum. Brain Mapp.
Cited by (158)
Backward masking reveals coarse-to-fine dynamics in human V1
2023, NeuroImageProsopagnosia does not abolish other-race effects
2023, Neuropsychologia