2009 Alina Liberman

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Fusiform Face Area Development Throughout Adolescence

The Fusiform Face Area (FFA) is a region in the occipitotemporal cortex that preferentially responds to visual face stimuli compared to place or object stimuli. Golarai et al.(2007) found that the right FFA was significantly smaller in children (ages 7-11) than in adolescents (12-16) or adults (>18). This size difference was not present for the right or left hemisphere face-selective superior temporal sulcus (STS) or the object-selective lateral occipital complex area (LOC). The left hemisphere place-selective parahippocampal place area (PPA) was also significantly smaller in children. These results support a region and category-specific development of high-level visual cortex for faces and places.

An ongoing follow-up study with a new set of subjects and stimuli replicates the right FFA results, except that we find a significantly smaller right FFA in adolescents ages 12-16. This result suggests that cortical development for face processing continues beyond childhood and into adolescence. What may account for this difference in results? In addition to slightly different stimuli, the original study had different analysis methods for their fMRI data. The original study had bigger voxels (3.75mm x 3.75mm vs. 3.125mm x 3.125mm in-plane resolution) and spatially smoothed the data using a 6mm full-width-half-maximum kernel. Since many developmental FFA studies report smoothed group data (Passarotti et al., 2003; Scherf et al., 2007), I wanted to ask the following questions:

1. How would these results change if the same data was spatially smoothed and normalized (i.e. location, response amplitudes, and size of ROIs)?
2. Would the significant age affect for the size of the right FFA survive?

Background

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Methods

Measuring object selective cortex

Object-selective cortical maps were obtained in 25 subjects using two localizer scans. The right and left FFA was localized in most of the subjects using an uncorrected threshold of p=.001.

Subjects

Subjects were 14 healthy adolescents and 11 healthy adults .

MR acquisition

Data were obtained on a GE scanner.

MR Analysis

The MR data was analyzed using mrVista software tools.

Pre-processing

All data were slice-time corrected, motion corrected, and repeated scans were averaged together to create a single average scan for each subject. Et cetera.

Results

Retinotopic models in native space

Some text. Some analysis. Some figures.

Conclusions

Here is where you say what your results mean.

References - Resources and related work

References

Software