Categorical learning revealed in activity pattern of left fusiform cortex

The brain is organized such that it encodes and maintains category information about thousands of objects. However, how learning shapes these neural representations of object categories is unknown. The present study focuses on faces, examining whether: (1) Enhanced categorical discrimination or (2) Feature analysis enhances face/non-face categorization in the brain. Stimuli ranged from non-faces to faces with two-toned Mooney images used for testing and gray-scale images used for training. The stimulus set was specifically chosen because it has a true categorical boundary between faces and non-faces but the stimuli surrounding that boundary have very similar features, making the boundary harder to learn. Brain responses were measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants categorized the stimuli before and after training. Participants were either trained with a categorization task, or with non-categorical semblance analyzation. Interestingly, when participants were categorically trained, the neural activity pattern in the left fusiform gyrus shifted from a graded representation of the stimuli to a categorical representation. This corresponded with categorical face/non-face discrimination, critically including both an increase in selectivity to faces and a decrease in false alarm response to non-faces. By contrast, while activity pattern in the right fusiform cortex correlated with face/non-face categorization prior to training, it was not affected by learning. Our results reveal the key role of the left fusiform cortex in learning face categorization. Given the known right hemisphere dominance for face-selective responses, our results suggest a rethink of the relationship between the two hemispheres in face/non-face categorization. Hum Brain Mapp 38:3648-3658, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.