The Quest for the FFA led to the Expertise Account of its Specialization

This article is written in response to Kanwisher's Progressions article " The Quest for the FFA and Where It Led " (Kanwisher, 2017). I reflect on the extensive research program dedicated to the study of how and why perceptual expertise explains the many ways that faces are special, a research program that both predates and follows Kanwisher's 1997 landmark article where the fusiform face area (FFA) is named. The expertise accounts suggests that the FFA is an area recruited by expertise individuating objects that are perceptually similar because they share a configuration of parts. While Kanwisher (2017) discussed the expertise account only very briefly and only to dismiss it, there is strong and replicable evidence that responses in the FFA are highly sensitive to experience with non-face objects. I point out that Kanwisher was well positioned to present these findings in their historical context as she participated in the design of the first fMRI study on car and bird expertise, as well as the first replication of this finding. Perhaps most relevant to readers interested in the neural bases of face processing, it is important to distinguish studies that describe the phenomenon of face-selectivity from those that test an explanation for this phenomenon. Kanwisher's claim of a face-dedicated processing module that is not the result of our experience with faces is made without attention to a great deal of expertise research which is directly inconsistent with that claim. The claim also lacks more direct support, as face-selective responses in the visual system are not found in infants and children and face-selective activity in FFA does not appear to be heritable.