The fusiform face area: in quest of holistic face processing.

Editor's Note: These short, critical reviews of recent papers in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to summarize the important findings of the paper and provide additional insight and commentary. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see Review of Andrews et al. What role do external facial features (hair, moustaches, beards, etc.) play in face rec-ognition? Many of us have experienced the difficulty of recognizing a friend or a colleague who had changed her hairstyle or had shaved his beard. Such a change seems like not just a change in the facial hair, but rather the whole face looks different. This phenomenon of face processing is called holistic processing, meaning that we perceive the face as a whole and not as a set of separate, independently processed features. Holistic processing is generally accepted to be unique to faces and provides strong support for the notion that faces are processed differently relative to all other object categories (Farah et al., 1998). While there are a large number of fMRI studies exploring the neural mechanisms of face processing, few of them have focused directly on ho-listic processing mechanisms (e.g., Schiltz and Rossion, 2006). Therefore, the study of Andrews et al. (2010), who investigated holistic processing by manipulating external and internal (eyes, nose, and mouth) facial features, provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the neural basis of holistic face processing. Andrews et al. (2010) conducted three fMRI experiments to examine how external and internal features are represented in face-selective occipitotemporal brain areas. They used a block-design fMR-adaptation paradigm (Grill-Spector and Malach, 2001). This method is based on the finding that repeated presentation of the same stimulus results in reduced fMRI response. In the fMR-adaptation paradigm used by Andrews et al. (2010), each condition is represented by two types of blocks: completely identical pictures (same) and pictures that differ in a single given dimension (different). Stronger neural response to the different relative to the same blocks (release from fMR-adaptation) suggests that the region of interest is involved to some extent in processing the manipulated dimension. Conversely , equal neural response to different and same blocks (fMR-adaptation) suggests that the region of interest is not sensitive to the dimension manipulated in the different block. One should be aware, however, of the possible pitfalls in the interpretation of fMR-adaptation results (Bartels …