Differences in neural responses to ipsilateral stimuli in wide-view fields between face- and house-selective areas

PLoS One. 2018 Feb 16;13(2):e0192532. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192532. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Category-selective brain areas exhibit varying levels of neural activity to ipsilaterally presented stimuli. However, in face- and house-selective areas, the neural responses evoked by ipsilateral stimuli in the peripheral visual field remain unclear. In this study, we displayed face and house images using a wide-view visual presentation system while performing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The face-selective areas (fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA)) exhibited intense neural responses to ipsilaterally presented images, whereas the house-selective areas (parahippocampal place area (PPA) and transverse occipital sulcus (TOS)) exhibited substantially smaller and even negative neural responses to the ipsilaterally presented images. We also found that the category preferences of the contralateral and ipsilateral neural responses were similar. Interestingly, the face- and house-selective areas exhibited neural responses to ipsilateral images that were smaller than the responses to the contralateral images. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was implemented to evaluate the difference between the contralateral and ipsilateral responses. The classification accuracies were much greater than those expected by chance. The classification accuracies in the FFA were smaller than those in the PPA and TOS. The closer eccentricities elicited greater classification accuracies in the PPA and TOS. We propose that these ipsilateral neural responses might be interpreted by interhemispheric communication through intrahemispheric connectivity of white matter connection and interhemispheric connectivity via the corpus callosum and occipital white matter connection. Furthermore, the PPA and TOS likely have weaker interhemispheric communication than the FFA and OFA, particularly in the peripheral visual field.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain / diagnostic imaging
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Male
  • Neurons / physiology*
  • Photic Stimulation*
  • Visual Fields*

Grants and funding

This project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61503272, 61305142, 81471752, 81471652, and 81771824), the Natural Science Foundation of Shanxi (2015021090), a project funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2016M601287), and the Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, the State Education Ministry, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), KAKENHI (25249026 and 25303013). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.