Abstract
Face recognition is highly proficient in humans and other social primates; it emerges in infancy, but the development of the neural mechanisms supporting this behaviour is largely unknown. We use blood-volume functional MRI to monitor longitudinally the responsiveness to faces, scrambled faces, and objects in macaque inferotemporal cortex (IT) from 1 month to 2 years of age. During this time selective responsiveness to monkey faces emerges. Some functional organization is present at 1 month; face-selective patches emerge over the first year of development, and are remarkably stable once they emerge. Face selectivity is refined by a decreasing responsiveness to non-face stimuli.
Highlights
Face recognition is highly proficient in humans and other social primates; it emerges in infancy, but the development of the neural mechanisms supporting this behaviour is largely unknown
When we looked at the face and object patches in inferotemporal cortex (IT), visual responses were apparent in the face region of interest (ROI) from the earliest sessions, with clear differences in category response magnitude emerging only later
We used blood-volume functional MRI (fMRI) to monitor the emergence of the face-patch system in normally developing macaque monkeys
Summary
Face recognition is highly proficient in humans and other social primates; it emerges in infancy, but the development of the neural mechanisms supporting this behaviour is largely unknown. We use blood-volume functional MRI to monitor longitudinally the responsiveness to faces, scrambled faces, and objects in macaque inferotemporal cortex (IT) from 1 month to 2 years of age. During this time selective responsiveness to monkey faces emerges. We monitored the emergence and refinement of the most well-studied IT domain, face patches, longitudinally from 1 month to more than 2 years of age using functional MRI (fMRI) of alert macaques over their normal development. Face selectivity emerged primarily via a decrement in responsiveness to non-face images, indicating a role for pruning in generating category-selective domains These results indicate an early, probably innate, proto-organization of IT that is sculpted by experience
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