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

Abstract

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...

Morphological brain changes associated with negative symptoms in patients with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome

“…social anhedonia). The fusiform gyrus, which is included in the MOT and MT/PCC regions, is strongly implicated in face processing which is a crucial aspect of social cognition (Kanwisher et al, 1997;Kanwisher and Yovel, 2006;Tsao et al, 2008). This result is in line with studies showing that adolescents with 22q11DS who have higher levels of negative symptoms typically perform worse on facial recognition tasks (Schneider et al, 2015).…”

Interpreting fMRI data: maps, modules and dimensions

“…1). The location and functional properties of these regions are very similar across humans 5,20 .Additional areas with weaker selectivity for some of these object categories 7 have been described, but no selectivity of similar strength and spatial scale has been reported for other object categories 21 . This lack of selectivity for other categories does not mean that no such preferences exist in the cortex.…”

“…Studies using fMRI adaptation 5,20 have indicated that the FFA discriminates between different individual faces 36 and the LOC discriminates between individual object exemplars 37,38 . Adaptation studies have also shown that these regions are partly insensitive to size, position and spatial scale 39,40 but more sensitive to viewpoint and direction of illumination 37,41,42 .…”

“…For example, in essentially all humans cortical regions can be found that respond selectively to faces (the fusiform face area (FFA) 5,6 and, in many individuals, the occipital face area (OFA)) 7,8 , to places and -to a lesser extent -to buildings (the parahippocampal place area (PPA)) 9,10 , to body parts (the extrastriate body area (EBA) [11][12][13] and, in most people, the fusiform body area 14,15 ) and to visually presented words or letter strings [16][17][18][19] (FIG. 1).…”

The Role of Face Familiarity in Eye Tracking of Faces by Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Currently, there are two divergent viewpoints regarding the specific role of the fusiform gyrus in face perception. The first suggests that the fusiform gyrus is specialized for face perception (e.g., Rhodes et al 2004); for this reason, the posterior lateral fusiform gyrus is often referred to as the Fusiform Face Area (FFA; Kanwisher et al 1997;Kanwisher and Yovel 2006). Evidence from numerous studies suggests that the FFA responds to faces more than any other class of visual stimulus (Haxby et al 1994;Puce et al 1995;Kanwisher et al 1997;Kanwisher 2000).…”