Neural responses to expression and gaze in the posterior superior temporal sulcus interact with facial identity.

ABSTRACT: Neural models of human face perception propose parallel pathways. One pathway (including posterior superior temporal sulcus, pSTS) is responsible for processing changeable aspects of faces such as gaze and expression, and the other pathway (including the fusiform face area, FFA) is responsible for relatively invariant aspects such as identity. However, to be socially meaningful, changes in expression and gaze must be tracked across an individual face. Our aim was to investigate how this is achieved. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found a region in pSTS that responded more to sequences of faces varying in gaze and expression in which the identity was constant compared with sequences in which the identity varied. To determine whether this preferential response to same identi

SUBMITTER: Baseler HA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3920770 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature