Systems neuroscienceThe timing of face selectivity and attentional modulation in visual processing
Section snippets
Subjects
Seven, healthy right-handed Caucasian male subjects participated (mean age, 30.0±5.0 years). All subjects were in good health with no history of psychiatric or neurological disease, and gave informed, written consent. The MEG protocol had been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of RIKEN. Fifty-seven (34 women and 23 men, mean age 26.0±12.0) subjects from the University of Western Sydney participated in a behavioral experiment corresponding to the task of experiment 2. The study was
Behavioral experiment
Fifty-seven subjects participated in behavioral experiments designed for stimulus selection and validation. Data from three participants (two women and a man) were excluded due to inadvertent events that impeded successful data collection. The dependent measure, gender identification accuracy, was converted into d′ values separately for face and hand stimuli (Tanner and Swets, 1954). Four participants (two women and two men) were excluded from further analysis because their average d′ value was
Discussion
We extracted accurate, millisecond-by-millisecond tomographic estimates of brain activity from MEG data and used them to clarify two important issues. First, we defined the timing of face specificity in the FG, and specifically, we established that the FG is preferentially activated by Face stimuli compared with other objects within 100 ms. Second, we documented the timing and nature of modulations in the FG and striate cortex responses to Face and Non-Face stimuli for various degrees of
Acknowledgments
We thank Kenji Haruhana for his help in running the experiments, Vahe Poghosyan for his help in data analysis and Masaki Maruyama for his valuable discussion and advice in data analysis. We also thank Daniel Palomo for his help in redaction of the manuscript and valuable comments. Research at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) was supported by the UWS International Research Initiative Scheme (80461) and a Research Agreement with RIKEN Brain Science Institute.
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2011, Vision ResearchCitation Excerpt :Nevertheless, we believe that they carry significant information regarding the time course of face categorization in the human brain. The larger P1 for pictures of faces than cars is in line with previous observations of larger P1 to faces than objects in general (e.g., Eimer, 1998; Goffaux et al., 2003; Herrmann et al., 2005; Itier & Taylor, 2004a, 2004b; Liu et al., 2002; Okazaki et al., 2008). Here we show for the first time that this P1 amplitude difference between faces and cars is similar for both intact and scrambled stimuli.