Extracting variant and invariant information from faces: The neural substrates of gaze detection and sex categorization

Abstract

Guided by influential models of face processing, efforts have been expended to uncover the neural substrates subserving the many facets of face perception. Extending this work, the present study used functional brain imaging (fMRI) to explore the relationship between the operations supporting the explicit extraction of sex and gaze-related information from faces. The brain imaging data showed the right superior temporal sulcus to be preferentially involved during assessments of gaze direction and a region of the left fusiform gyrus to be involved during sex categorization. These results provide support for the distributed face-processing model advanced by Haxby and colleagues ( 2000 Haxby, J. V. , Hoffman, E. A. and Gobbini, I. M. 2000. The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4: 223–233. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ).