Current Biology
Volume 32, Issue 2, 24 January 2022, Pages 265-274.e5
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Article
Selective responses to faces, scenes, and bodies in the ventral visual pathway of infants

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.10.064Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Category-selective responses are present within the first year of life

  • FFA, PPA, and EBA are face, scene, and body selective, respectively, in infancy

  • Selective responses did not reach significance in infant OFA, OPA, RSC, or FBA

  • Category-selective responses are not explained by visual “protomaps”

Summary

Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development or do they require many years to develop? Prior evidence leaves this question unresolved. We designed a new 32-channel infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coil and collected high-quality functional MRI (fMRI) data from infants (2–9 months of age) while they viewed stimuli from four conditions—faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. We find that infants have face-, scene-, and body-selective responses in the location of the adult FFA, PPA, and EBA, respectively, powerfully constraining accounts of cortical development.

Keywords

infant cortex
category selectivity
FFA
PPA
EBA
faces
bodies
scenes
infancy
high-level vision
development

Data and code availability

  • De-identified results from the functional region of interest analyses have been deposited at osf.io and are publicly available as of the date of publication. Accession numbers are listed in the Key resources table.

  • Group maps for the three published contrasts have been deposited at osf.io and are publicly available as of the data of publication. Accession numbers are listed in the Key resources table.

  • All original code has been deposited at osf.io and is publicly available as of the date of publication. DOIs are listed in the Key resources table.

  • Any additional information required to reanalyze the data reported in this paper is available from the lead contact upon request.

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Twitter: @heatherlkos

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Lead contact