MIT CSAIL talk: Functional Specificity in the Cortex: Selectivity, Experience, & Generality

Speaker: Nancy Kanwisher , MIT BCS

Functional MRI has revealed several cortical regions in the ventral visual pathway in humans that exhibit a striking degree of functional specificity: the fusiform face area (FFA), parahippocampal place area (PPA), and extrastriate body area (EBA). I will briefly review this work and then discuss more recent studies that investigate the specificity, origins, and generality of domain specificity in the cortex. In particular these studies ask i) how specialized is the FFA for faces and what exactly it does with faces?, ii) how do cortical responses to visually presented objects change with experience and is extensive experience ever sufficient to create them?, and iii) are domain specific regions of cortex found only in the visual system, or can they sometimes be found for very abstract high-level cognitive functions as well?