Independent face- and body-selective response patterns in human fusiform gyrus during whole-person perception D Kaiser1, L Strnad1, K N Seidl2, S Kastner2, M V Peelen1 |
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1Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy |
| Previous neuroimaging studies that investigated neural responses to (bodiless) faces and (headless) bodies have reported overlapping face- and body-selective brain regions in right fusiform gyrus (FG). In daily life, however, faces and bodies are typically perceived together and integrated into a whole person. This raises the question of how neural activity in response to a whole person relates to activity evoked by the same face and body presented in isolation. The present study used fMRI to model the relation between FG responses to faces, bodies, and whole persons. We found that responses in right FG were significantly higher to persons than to bodies and faces shown in isolation, even in category-specific regions that were defined by their selectivity for faces (FFA) or bodies (FBA). Using multi-voxel pattern analysis, we then modeled person-evoked response patterns in right FG through a linear combination of face- and body-evoked response patterns. We found that these synthetic patterns were able to accurately approximate the response patterns to persons, with face and body patterns each adding unique information to the response patterns evoked by whole-person stimuli. Our results suggest that whole-person responses in FG primarily arise from the co-activation of independent face- and body-selective neural populations. |
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