Which hemisphere recognizes faces

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View fullsize. Receive New Content by Email. Order Now. Indeed, there has been substantial consensus on his point. One of the goals of our studies has been to examine the extent to which these systems are truly independent.

The motivation for the investigations grew out of our observation that in most, if not all, functional imaging studies, word-selective and face-selective brain activation is usually present in both hemispheres is bilateral rather than just in a single hemisphere unilateral and that, interestingly, the sites of activation are the same across the two hemispheres. Our findings suggest that word and face representations are not as independent as previously thought.

From a clinical perspective, this is also an interesting avenue for research. For example, damage to each hemisphere affects the perception of both words and faces and difficulty in acquiring mastery over say word recognition is associated with reduced use of just one hemisphere for face representations.

Taken together, the mechanisms used for face and word recognition form part of a more complex, dynamic system, which, over the course of development, comes to be optimized for rapid and efficient recognition of complex visual inputs. Behrmann: We know that in adults, the left hemisphere is better than the right hemisphere of the brain in recognizing words. This is probably because in the majority of the population, language systems are more left- than right-sided. We were particularly interested in exploring how this mature hemispheric profile emerges over development or whether it is present from a very young age.

We conducted a half-field study in which we presented subjects with words or faces in each visual field, on the right or left. We showed that adults evinced the complementary superiority of faces in the left visual field right hemisphere and words in the right visual field left hemisphere. Although adolescents were overall as accurate as adults, they only showed a left hemisphere advantage for words and no hemisphere difference for faces.

The same was true for younger children, although their overall accuracy was lower than either of the other groups. These findings suggest that the division between the hemispheres in visual recognition for words precedes that for faces.

We also showed that the extent to which a participant was a proficient reader was predictive of specialization of face perception on the right hemisphere.

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The FFA has been implicated in holistic processing of spatial relations Rossion et al. Whether or not the LVF bias for face-processing mechanisms in the right hemisphere sufficiently explains the LVF half-face advantage is less clear. A combined behavioral and neuroimaging study by Yovel, Tambini and Brandman explicitly implicates the FFA as underlying the LVF half-face advantage, which highlights the possibility of a common underlying mechanism for LVF advantage reported for both peripherally and centrally viewed faces.

This means that, like the LVF advantage for peripherally viewed whole faces, the LVF half-face advantage may too involve an LVF advantage, albeit closer to the center of gaze.

Despite the plausibility of a common mechanism underlying the LVF bias for faces viewed centrally and peripherally, the results of our experiments complicate this view. In our study, we found that for half-faces viewed alone, in either the RVF or the LVF, equivalent recognition accuracy and inversion effects occurred in each location. We interpret this as indicative of equivalent processing of spatial relations for RVF and LVF half-faces viewed in isolation.

Our finding of equivalent processing for RVF and LVF halves of centrally viewed faces when viewed alone suggests that greater face-processing resources are available for centrally viewed faces as compared to peripherally viewed faces. That is, in contrast to the LVF advantage for peripherally viewed faces, the LVF half-face bias may arise as the result of a limitation in applying face-processing resources simultaneously to hemifield-split half-faces rather than an inherent deficit of processing of RVF face stimuli by the LH.

It is plausible that the presence of an upright LVF half-face biases this competition by allocating face-processing resources to the LVF at the expense of RVF face processing, even though equivalent half-face processing is possible for the RVF half of a face when viewed alone. Their results are consistent with ours from Experiments 2 b and 3 , for which we observed no differences in recognition performance, but the equivalent LVF and RVF holistic processing they observed contrasts with our finding of an LVF advantage for centrally viewed upright whole faces.

However, the paradigm they used depended on cuing either LVF or RVF half-faces, which would be consistent with the biasing of attention toward the LVF or RVF by the presence of only one half face Experiment 2 b or the pairing of an upright and inverted half-face Experiment 3. A resource allocation explanation would thus reconcile the results of our experiments with those of Liu et al. Our experiments did not manipulate attention, so we can only speculate about a potential role of attention in our results.

A possible role of visual attention has been acknowledged in previous studies of the LVF half-face advantage because it exhibits an inherent LVF bias for faces and non-face stimuli J. If so, the prioritization of LVF face processing would reflect a means of optimizing allocation of limited face-processing resources, especially those in the RH.

Whether prioritization of LVF half-face processing is the product of a learned attention mechanism, or an alternative mechanism, we propose that it is necessary to account for the LVF half-face bias, in addition to the coupling of RH superiority and LVF-RH correspondence. This proposal is also relevant to similarities and differences between the LVF half-face advantage and the LVF advantage for whole faces.

We also note that the LVF advantage occurs for single whole faces viewed in the periphery Dundas et al. We conclude that RH superiority alone is not sufficient to explain the LVF advantage in face recognition, and that an additional condition, the prioritization of an upright LVF half-face over a simultaneously viewed upright half-face in the RVF, is necessary to account for the LVF half-face bias.

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