The amygdala is thought to play a critical role in detecting salient stimuli. Several studies have taken ecological approaches to investigating such saliency, and argue for domain-specific effects for processing certain natural stimulus categories, in particular faces and animals. Linking this to the amygdala, neurons in the human amygdala have been found to respond strongly to faces and also t...

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests a gradual, experiencedependent specialization of cortical face processing systems that takes place largely in the 1st year of life. To further investigate these findings, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from typically developing 9-month-old infants presented with pictures of familiar and unfamiliar monkey or human faces in 2 d...

We assessed the specificity to human faces of the N170 ERP component in the context of natural scenes. Subjects categorized photographs containing human faces, animal faces and various objects. Spatiotemporal topography analyses were performed on the individual ERP data. ERPs elicited by animal faces were similar to human faces ERPs but with a delayed face activity. In the N170 time window, ERP...

It is known that the adult visual memory system is fractionable into functionally independent cognitive subsystems, selectively susceptible to brain damage. However, it is unclear whether these cognitive subsystems can fractionate developmentally. The present study describes an investigation of visual memory of a patient (PE) with multiple developmental disorders. PE was congenitally deaf, had ...

Animals, including dogs, dolphins, monkeys and man, follow gaze. What mediates this bias towards the eyes? One hypothesis is that primates possess a distinct neural module that is uniquely tuned for the eyes of others. An alternative explanation is that configural face processing drives fixations to the middle of peoples' faces, which is where the eyes happen to be located. We distinguish betwe...