Dartmouth Events

CBB talk series

Please join us for a talk given by Ratan Murty, a postdoctoral research associate at MIT.

Thursday, November 7, 2019
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Moore Hall, room 202
Intended Audience(s): Faculty, Postdoc, Students-Graduate
Categories: Lectures & Seminars
Registration required.

Is visual experience necessary for the development of face selectivity in the lateral fusiform gyrus?

Abstract:

The fusiform face area (FFA) responds selectively to faces and is causally involved in face perception. How does the FFA arise in development, and why does it develop so systematically in the same location across individuals? Preferential fMRI responses to faces arises early by around 6 months of age in humans (Deen et al., 2017). Arcaro et al (2017) have further shown in monkeys that regions that later become face selective are correlated in resting fMRI with foveal retinotopic cortex in newborns, and that monkeys reared without ever seeing a face show no face-selective patches. These findings have been taken to argue that 1) seeing faces is necessary for the development of face selective patches and 2) face patches arise in previously fovea-biased cortex because early experience with faces is foveally biased.

I will present evidence against both these hypotheses. We scanned congenitally blind subjects with fMRI while they performed a one-back haptic shape discrimination task, sequentially palpating 3D printed photorealistic models of faces, hands, mazes and chairs in a blocked design. We observed robust face selectivity in the lateral fusiform gyrus of most congenitally blind subjects during haptic exploration of 3D-printed stimuli, indicating that neither visual experience, nor fovea-biased input, nor visual expertise is necessary for face selectivity to arise in its characteristic location. Similar resting fMRI correlation fingerprints in individual blind and sighted participants suggest a role for long- range connectivity in the specification of the cortical locus of face selectivity.

For more information, contact:
Courtney Rogers

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.