Differen0ating the contributions of domain-specific regions within the medial temporal lobe and extrastriate cortex to perception

对面孔、场景和物体的感知和记忆对于成功的社会互动和在我们的环境中导航是必要的。因此，了解我们如何区分和记住这些不同类别的刺激，是认知和社会神经科学的关键问题。该项目通过使用功能性神经成像来识别对特定类别的视觉刺激有选择性反应的大脑区域，从而有助于解决这个问题。然后，拟议的实验询问这些不同的区域如何支持我们区分这些视觉类别之间和内部的项目的能力。例如，人类的三个大脑区域--枕骨面部区域、梭状面部区域和嗅周皮层--与场景和物体相比，对面部表现出特别强烈的反应。这些大脑区域的损伤或破坏导致区分不同面孔的困难，但对场景和物体的影响较小。因此，对面孔的处理显然依赖于分布在人脑中的一些特殊脑区。然而，到目前为止，我们对这三个面部区域如何有助于感知和识别面部知之甚少，包括了解每个区域中存储的面部信息类型，以及这些表示是否是这些区域中面部所独有的。我们也不知道这些区域是否单独（或一起）在任务中被要求区分面孔，以及这是否取决于视觉相似性等因素。将这些问题扩展到面部刺激之外，关于我们从面部实验中学到的信息是否可以推广到专门用于处理其他视觉类别（如场景和物体）的特定领域区域，还有一些悬而未决的问题。这是我们提案中一个重要且新颖的部分，因为泛化的证据将突出人类大脑如何获取，存储和使用有关视觉类别的信息的基本神经原理，而不仅仅是面部刺激。为了解决这些重要的问题，拟议的项目旨在使用功能性神经成像来询问哪些大脑区域对不同的类别敏感（例如，面部、场景和物体）以及这些区域如何帮助支持对构成这些类别的项目的感知。计划中的实验将确定这些区域如何存储不同类别的刺激（例如，通过包括这些项目或作为整个项目的视觉特征），并帮助识别这些大脑区域对感知的贡献。该研究计划是新颖的，因为它旨在整合两个通常独立研究的心理学科（感知和记忆）的方法，包括调查被认为是唯一专门用于记忆处理的区域如何也有助于感知。它还旨在寻找跨视觉类别和跨大脑区域的共性（和差异）;这种方法在认知神经科学研究中很少见，但在这里，我们计划的实验将确保我们对大脑如何表示和记忆刺激类别的理解取得重大进展，这些刺激类别是与人和环境成功互动的关键。

Perception of, and memory for, faces, scenes and objects is necessary for successful social interaction and navigation in our environment. Understanding how we tell apart and remember these different categories of stimuli, therefore, is a key question in cognitive and social neuroscience. This project contributes to this question by using functional neuroimaging to identify brain areas that are selective in their response to particular categories of visual stimuli. The proposed experiments then ask how these different regions support our ability to distinguish items both across and within these visual categories. For example, three brain regions in humans - the occipital face area, fusiform face area and perirhinal cortex - show particularly strong responses to faces, compared to scenes and objects. Damage or disruption to these brain regions results in difficulties in telling apart different faces, but less so scenes and objects. Processing of faces, therefore, is clearly dependent upon a number of special brain areas distributed throughout the human brain. As yet, however, we know little about how these three face regions contribute to perceiving and identifying faces, including understanding what type of facial information is stored in each region, and whether these representations are unique to faces across these regions. We also do not know whether these areas are recruited separately (or together) during tasks in which one is required to tell apart faces, and whether this differs depending upon factors such as visual similarity. Extending these questions beyond face stimuli, there are outstanding issues regarding whether the information we learn from our experiments on faces can be generalised to domain-specific regions specialised for processing other visual categories, such as scenes and objects. This is an important, and novel, part of our proposal, as evidence of generalisation would highlight fundamental neural principles about how the human brain acquires, stores and uses information about visual categories, as opposed to just face stimuli. To address these important questions, the proposed project aims to use functional neuroimaging to ask which brain areas are sensitive to distinct categories (e.g., faces, scenes and objects) and how these regions help support perception for items that comprise these categories. The planned experiments will identify similarities and differences in how these regions store different categories of stimuli (e.g., by visual features comprising these items or as whole items) and help identify the contribution made by these brain areas to perception. The programme of research is novel in that it aims to integrate methods from two psychological disciplines (perception and memory) that are typically researched independently, including investigating how regions thought to be uniquely specialised for memory processing may also contribute to perception. It also aims to look for commonalities (and differences) across visual categories and across brain areas; this approach is rare in cognitive neuroscience research, but ensures, here, that our planned experiments will result in significant advances in our understanding of how the brain represents and remembers categories of stimuli key to successful interactions with people, and the environment.