NEURAL PROCESSING OF HUMAN FACES - A MAGNETOENCEPHALOGRAPHIC STUDY

This is a whole head magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study of the neural processing of briefly presented images of human faces in 14 normal su bjects. The experiments involved three tasks of increasing complexity, involving image categorisation, image comparison and the identificati on of emotion. The analyses were based on average responses to repeate d stimuli in the different image categories. These averages were proce ssed to give numerical measures of the power within defined regions an d latency spans. The only statistically significant difference in thes e data between the response to faces and other images is in the right occipito-temporal channels at a latency of 140 ms. The face-specific r esponse is largely independent of the task. Source modelling suggests an extended source in the ventral occipito-temporal region. The analys is supports the notions of both face-specificity and right hemisphere dominance for all image types at early latencies.