Elsevier

Neuroscience

Volume 152, Issue 4, 9 April 2008, Pages 1130-1144
Neuroscience

Systems neuroscience
The timing of face selectivity and attentional modulation in visual processing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2008.01.056Get rights and content

Abstract

Despite the complete imprint of a visual scene on the retina, the brain selects particular items for further processing. However, there is considerable debate about when and where the first attentional effects take hold in the cortex. We examined the timing of face specificity and attentional influences in the primary/secondary visual cortex (V1/V2) and in the fusiform gyrus (FG) in two experiments using magnetoencephalography (MEG). In experiment 1, using a passive viewing task, we identified three components in response to “Face,” “Hand,” and “Shoe” stimuli bilaterally in the FG: MFG100, MFG170, and MFG200—all showing a stronger preference for faces. The timing of these three activations of the FG is consistent with earlier studies claiming distinct stages of processing of visual stimuli in the first 300 ms. In experiment 2, subjects performed a gender-discrimination task on either faces or hands, drawing attention to only one of the two object categories. In addition to the previously identified three components in FG, here we found object-selective attentional enhancement first appearing in V1/V2 at around 170 ms, and then in FG at around 200 ms, i.e. concurrent with the third component. No attentional effects were evident on the first or second magnetoencephalography components. These findings may indicate that the visual input for an object is first encoded and matched to an attended “cue” object held in mind. When the attended and encoded objects match, a third stage involving attentive processing is enhanced.

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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