4.5 Article

The role of animal faces in the animate-inanimate distinction in the ventral temporal cortex

期刊

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
卷 169, 期 -, 页码 -

出版社

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108192

关键词

fMRI; Ventral temporal cortex; Object representations; Face perception; Animacy; Category selectivity

资金

  1. Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [RGPIN-2017-04088]
  2. Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

向作者/读者索取更多资源

The human ventral temporal cortex shows distinct response patterns to animate and inanimate objects. The presence of a face is a prominent feature that distinguishes animals from inanimate objects and could explain the animate-inanimate distinction in the VTC. This fMRI study found that animals with faces elicit a stronger animate/inanimate response in the VTC, but faces are not necessary to observe high-level animacy information in certain regions of the VTC.
Animate and inanimate objects elicit distinct response patterns in the human ventral temporal cortex (VTC), but the exact features driving this distinction are still poorly understood. One prominent feature that distinguishes typical animals from inanimate objects and that could potentially explain the animate-inanimate distinction in the VTC is the presence of a face. In the current fMRI study, we investigated this possibility by creating a stimulus set that included animals with faces, faceless animals, and inanimate objects, carefully matched in order to minimize other visual differences. We used both searchlight-based and ROI-based representational similarity analysis (RSA) to test whether the presence of a face explains the animate-inanimate distinction in the VTC. The searchlight analysis revealed that when animals with faces were removed from the analysis, the animateinanimate distinction almost disappeared. The ROI-based RSA revealed a similar pattern of results, but also showed that, even in the absence of faces, information about agency (a combination of animal's ability to move and think) is present in parts of the VTC that are sensitive to animacy. Together, these analyses showed that animals with faces do elicit a stronger animate/inanimate response in the VTC, but that faces are not necessary in order to observe high-level animacy information (e.g., agency) in parts of the VTC. A possible explanation could be that this animacy-related activity is driven not by faces per se, or the visual features of faces, but by other factors that correlate with face presence, such as the capacity for self-movement and thought. In short, the VTC might treat the face as a proxy for agency, a ubiquitous feature of familiar animals.

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