Differential spatial computations in ventral and lateral face-selective regions are scaffolded by structural connections

Dawn Finzi,Jesse Gomez,Marisa Nordt,Kalanit Grill-Spector,Sonia Poltoratski,Alex A Rezai

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22524-2

Dawn Finzi, Jesse Gomez + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22524-2

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Abstract

Face-processing occurs across ventral and lateral visual streams, which are involved in static and dynamic face perception, respectively. However, the nature of spatial computations across streams is unknown. Using functional MRI and population receptive field (pRF) mapping, we measured pRFs in face-selective regions. Results reveal that spatial computations by pRFs in ventral face-selective regions are concentrated around the center of gaze (fovea), but spatial computations in lateral face-selective regions extend peripherally. Diffusion MRI reveals that these differences are mirrored by a preponderance of white matter connections between ventral face-selective regions and foveal early visual cortex (EVC), while connections with lateral regions are distributed more uniformly across EVC eccentricities. These findings suggest a rethinking of spatial computations in face-selective regions, showing that they vary across ventral and lateral streams, and further propose that spatial computations in high-level regions are scaffolded by the fine-grain pattern of white matter connections from EVC.

Highlights

Face-processing occurs across ventral and lateral visual streams, which are involved in static and dynamic face perception, respectively
Using a multimodal approach, we tested how different faceselective regions of visual cortex represent visual space and whether this can be traced to white matter connections with early visual cortex (EVC)
We find that (i) contrary to the prevailing view, not all faceselective regions are foveally biased, as lateral face-selective regions show population receptive field (pRF) and visual field coverage (VFC) extending into the periphery, and that (ii) these differences are reflected in differential patterns of white matter connections with EVC, as lateral face-selective regions exhibit white matter connections that are more evenly distributed across eccentricities than ventral face-selective regions

Summary

Introduction

Face-processing occurs across ventral and lateral visual streams, which are involved in static and dynamic face perception, respectively. The ventral face processing stream is thought to be involved in face recognition[6,7,8,9] It begins in early visual cortex (EVC: union of V1, V2, V3), continues to the inferior aspects of the occipital and temporal cortex, and contains several face-selective regions: one on the inferior occipital gyrus (IOG-faces, referred to as the occipital face area, OFA), and two on the fusiform gyrus—one on the posterior fusiform (pFus-faces10) and one in the mid fusiform (mFus-faces10)— which are collectively referred to as the fusiform face area (FFA6). The computational demands hypothesis predicts that pRFs and VFC in lateral face-selective regions, which are involved in social and dynamic processing of faces, will extend to the periphery

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