fMRI evidence that hyper-caricatured faces activate object-selective cortex.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Brain Imaging

Background:

• Cortical responses to object categories and faces are well-studied.
• Face space models represent individual faces relative to an average face.
• Responses to highly caricatured faces remain underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate brain responses to faces varying in caricature level.
• Determine if increasing face caricature affects face-selective and object-selective regions.
• Explore the impact of facial inversion on neural responses.

Main Methods:

• Generated caricatured faces using principal component analysis (PCA) within a face space.
• Utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity.
• Defined face-, object-, and scene-selective areas using a localizer scan.

Main Results:

• Increased caricature led to more consistent fMRI response patterns in the right fusiform face area (FFA).
• No significant effect of caricature level or inversion on average fMRI response in FFA or other face-selective regions.
• Object-selective regions showed increased response pattern consistency and average fMRI response with higher caricature levels.

Conclusions:

• Highly caricatured faces enhance processing in object-selective regions, potentially by emphasizing object-like low-level features.
• Neural responses to faces in FFA do not consistently increase with caricaturing.
• Caricatured faces may recruit object processing pathways, indicating flexible neural recruitment.