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Project

fMRI-defined body-selective patches in the macaque visual cortex: feature selectivity and contribution to body recognition.

The detection of bodies of humans and other animals is instrumental for survival: failing to recognize a predator can have deadly consequences and body postures are salient social signals. Non-verbal communication is partially based on gestures and by implication the analysis of body shape is crucial for social life. Despite the importance of body recognition in our daily life, it is stillĀ  nclear how the brain accomplishes this. Studies in humans and monkeys using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that two regions/patches in the temporal cortex are more strongly activated by visual images of bodies compared to other objects. The advantage of the monkey as model for human visual cognition is that one can investigate systematically the response properties of single neurons in and outside these fMRI defined patches. Here we will employ fMRI-guided single unit recording in monkeys, combined with state-of-the-art analysis and modelling tools, to determine the stimulus features that single neurons in the fMRI-defined body patches are selective for. Next, we will manipulate the activity in the body patches of monkeys and asses its impact on their perceptual discrimination. This research aims at an understanding of the stimulus processing in body-selective regions and thus of the cortical representations of bodies (and objects) in general, and, to determine the contribution of activity in these regions to perceptual behavior.

Date:1 Jan 2014 →  31 Dec 2017
Keywords:neurophysiology
Disciplines:Neurosciences, Biological and physiological psychology, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, Developmental psychology and ageing