ANAT 321 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Fusiform Face Area, Fusiform Gyrus, Two-Streams Hypothesis
26 Mar 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Ventral stream: important for processing forms (shapes of objects) in correspondence to certain things. E. g. defining a red car ventral stream sorts out the colour and the shape of it for you to recognize that it is a car. It is responsible for connecting the conscious perception of vision. Fusiform face area: a region of the ventral stream located within the fusiform gyrus (visual processing area) It is larger on the right side than on the left, and gets activated when humans/primates look at faces. It is a specific module in the brain involved in facial recognition. Ex: recording a neuron in the fusiform face area of a monkey. When the monkey is shown the face of another monkey neurons fire like crazy. When you switch the image to a facial illustration neurons fire vigorously, but not as much as it would to a real face. When you display a picture of a partial face the neurons fire weakly.
