Dr Davide Rivolta (Psychology UEL) is editing a Research Topic (i.e., special issue) in in the open-access Journal “Frontiers in Human Neuroscience”. The Research Topic focuses on typical and atypical aspects of face processing (http://journal.frontiersin.org/ResearchTopic/1903). With co-editors Prof. Aina Puce (Indiana University, Bloomington, US) and Prof. Mark A. Williams (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), Dr Rivolta is currently editing more than 40 submissions. This makes the current issue one of the most successful in “Frontiers in Human Neuroscience”.
Recently, Rivolta’s work on the neural correlates (fMRI) of congenital prosopagnosia (CP - i.e., a lifelong impairment in face recognition that affects around 2.5% of the general population) has been published in the Research Topic (http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00925/abstract).
In this work Rivolta et al. used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses to faces, objects, bodies, and body-parts in a group of CPs and healthy control participants. Using multivariate analysis of fMRI data (multi-voxel pattern analysis - MVPA) the authors demonstrate that neural activity within the “core” (i.e., occipital face area and fusiform face area) and “extended” (i.e., anterior temporal cortex) face regions in CPs showed reduced discriminability between faces and objects. In contrast, discriminability between faces and bodies/body-parts and objects and bodies/body-parts across the ventral visual system was typical in CPs.
In addition to MVPA analysis, Rivolta et al. also ran traditional mass-univariate analysis (i.e., Statistical Parametrical Mapping – SPM), which failed to show any group differences in face and object discriminability.
In sum, these findings demonstrate for the first time that (i) face-object representations impairments in CP which encompass both the “core” and “extended” face regions, and (ii) superior power of MVPA in detecting CP-controls differences.
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