Biology subjects

Taubert, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Taubert, J..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

The impact of stimulus size and orientation on individual face decoding in monkey face-selective cortex.

Face-selective neurons in the monkey temporal cortex discharge at different rates in response to pictures of different faces. Here we tested whether the population response of neurons in the face-selective area ML (located in the middle Superior Temporal Sulcus) tolerates two affine transformations; one, picture-plane inversion, known to have a deleterious impact on the average response of face-selective neurons and the other, stimulus size, thought to have little or no impact on face-selective neurons. We recorded the response of 57 ML neurons in two monkeys. Face stimuli were presented at two sizes (10 and 5 degrees of visual angle) and two orientations (upright and inverted). The results indicate that different faces elicited distinct patterns of activity across ML neurons that were tolerant of changes in size. However, the results of the orientation manipulation were mixed; despite observing a reduced response to inverted faces, classifier performance was above chance for both upright and inverted faces and the classification score did not differ significantly for inverted and upright faces. We conclude that population responses in area ML to different faces are dependent on stimulus orientation but are more tolerant to changes in stimulus size.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Characterizing the response to face pareidolia in human category-selective visual cortex

The neural mechanisms underlying face and object recognition are understood to originate in ventral occipital-temporal cortex. A key feature of the functional architecture of the visual ventral pathway is its category-selectivity, yet it is unclear how category-selective regions process ambiguous visual input which violates category boundaries. One example is the spontaneous misperception of faces in inanimate objects such as the Man in the Moon, in which an object belongs to more than one category and face perception is divorced from its usual diagnostic visual features. We used fMRI to investigate the representation of illusory faces in category-selective regions. The perception of illusory faces was decodable from activation patterns in the fusiform face area (FFA) and lateral occipital complex (LOC), but not from other visual areas. Further, activity in FFA was strongly modulated by the perception of illusory faces, such that even objects with vastly different visual features were represented similarly if all images contained an illusory face. The results show that the FFA is broadly-tuned for face detection, not finely-tuned to the homogenous visual properties that typically distinguish faces from other objects. A complete understanding of high-level vision will require explanation of the mechanisms underlying natural errors of face detection.

neuroscience↗