070614 Freiwald

The Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Freiburg

Announcement for the next

BCCN Seminar

Winrich Freiwald, PhD

Center for Advanced Imaging
Zentrum für Kognitionswissenschaften
Institut für Hirnforschung
Universität Bremen

On the Neural Machinery for Face Processing
– A Joint Imaging & Electrophysiology Approach

Lecture Hall (ground floor)
BCCN building
Hansastraße 9A
79104 Freiburg

FMRI in humans has revealed several cortical areas which respond more strongly to pictures of faces than to pictures of other objects. Whether these areas constitute modules or domains dedicated entirely to face-processing, is of fundamental importance to our understanding of information processing in the brain in general and has been the subject of much debate over the last years. Recently, using fMRI in awake, fixating macaque monkeys, we have found several patches of face-selective cortex within the temporal lobe, possibly homologous to human face-selective areas. In my talk, I will present electrophysiological data we have subsequently obtained by recording single-unit activity and local field potentials from inside two of these face-selective patches of cortex. These data speak to questions of domain specificity, principles of complex shape coding, processing hierarchies, and they exemplify the power of a joint fMRI and electrophysiology approach to understanding brain function. I will illustrate the last point with further applications of fMRI to identify networks of areas involved in performance of a cognitive task.

Host: Dr. Simone Cardoso de Oliveira