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Spatial processing by receptive fields is a core property of the visual system. However, it is unknown how spatial processing in high-level regions contributes to recognition behavior. As face inversion is thought to disrupt typical holistic processing of information in faces, we mapped population receptive fields (pRFs) with upright and inverted faces in the human visual system. Here we show that in face-selective regions, but not primary visual cortex, pRFs and overall visual field coverage are smaller and shifted downward in response to face inversion. From these measurements, we successfully predict the relative behavioral detriment of face inversion at different positions in the visual field. This correspondence between neural measurements and behavior demonstrates how spatial processing in face-selective regions may enable holistic perception. These results not only show that spatial processing in high-level visual regions is dynamically used towards recognition, but also suggest a powerful approach for bridging neural computations by receptive fields to behavior.
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Developmental emergence of holistic processing in word recognition
Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here, adopting the HP framework for faces, we examined the developmental emergence of HP in another domain for which human adults have expertise, namely, visual word processing. Children, adolescents, and adults performed a lexical decision task and we used two established signatures of HP for faces: the advantage in perception of upright over inverted words and nonwords and the reduced sensitivity to increasing parts (word length). Relative to the other groups, children showed less of an advantage for upright versus inverted trials and lexical decision was more affected by increasing word length. Performance on these HP indices was strongly associated with age and with reading proficiency. Also, the emergence of HP for word perception was not simply a result of improved visual perception over the course of development as no group differences were observed on an object decision task. These results reveal the developmental emergence of HP for orthographic input, and reflect a further instance of experience-dependent tuning of visual perception. These results also add to existing findings on the commonalities of mechanisms of word and face recognition.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2123069
- PAR ID:
- 10421725
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Science
- ISSN:
- 1363-755X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13372
