One way to investigate this possibility is to compare the FFA response in people who have experience with certain nonface stimuli with the response in people who have less experience with the particular stimulus category. This is the essence of the expertise hypothesis. However, the heightened response to faces in the FFA could also be a consequence of our extensive experience and expertise in dealing with faces. Damage to and around the FFA results in the inability to perceive faces (Barton, 2008 Mayer & Rossion, 2007 Barton, Press, Keenan, & O'Connor, 2002), and faces commonly activate the FFA twice as much as any other stimuli (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006). There is no denying the importance of the FFA in face perception. Here, I use the game of chess as a model for visual expertise to demonstrate that the FFA is indeed a general expertise module but that its function may extend beyond individuation and encompass parsing relations between elements of a complex stimulus. According to this expertise hypothesis, the FFA is responsible for visual individuation, that is, the ability to differentiate between different objects within any single category of stimuli. This fact has led to the view that the FFA is in fact a general visual expertise module, not necessarily specific to faces (Gauthier, Skudlarski, Gore, & Anderson, 2000 Gauthier, Tarr, Anderson, Skudlarski, & Gore, 1999). However, faces are not only crucial in our lives but also constitute one of the most often encountered, and consequently most often practiced, categories. This view reflects the immense importance of face perception in our lives (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006) and builds on the evolutionary assumption that a brain area can evolve to reflect exclusively the importance of a single stimulus category (Fodor, 1983). On one side of the debate, there is the view that the FFA is exclusively a face-specific brain module. The exact function of this brain region is however debated. The fusiform face area (FFA), a region in the inferotemporal cortex, plays an important role in face perception (Duchaine & Yovel, 2015 Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997). More likely, it parses complex multiobject stimuli that contain numerous functional and spatial relations. The FFA does not merely distinguish between different exemplars within the same category of stimuli. The experiments provide support for the general expertise view of the FFA function but also extend the scope of our understanding about the function of the FFA. The second experiment focused on the single chess objects and featured an explicit task of identifying the chess objects but failed to demonstrate expertise effects in the FFA. In contrast, single chess objects did not produce different activation patterns among experts and novices even when the multivariate pattern analysis was used. The first experiment demonstrates that chess expertise modulated the FFA activation when chess positions were presented. I also extend the previous research by presenting chess positions, complex scenes with multiple objects, and their interrelations to chess experts and novices as well as isolated chess objects. Here, I circumvent the shortcomings of some previous studies on the FFA controversy by using chess stimuli, which do not visually resemble faces, together with more sensitive methods of analysis such as multivariate pattern analysis. However, many researchers claim that the FFA is a general visual expertise module that distinguishes between individual examples within a single category. The fusiform face area (FFA) is considered to be a highly specialized brain module because of its central importance for face perception.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |