Category-selective top-down modulation in the fusiform face area of the human brain during visual search

Abstract

Several regions in the ventral-temporal cortex of the human brain are thought to have representations of specific categories of objects. Furthermore, a distributed network of frontal and parietal brain regions is implicated in attentional control. It is assumed that during visual search, attention-control regions send top-down signals to the target category-selective areas to bias the processing in favour of the attended object category. However, little is known about such causal interactions during naturalistic visual search. Here we assess the influence of attention-control brain regions on a well-known face selective area fusiform face area (FFA) during natural visual search using Granger causality analysis. Our results indicate that attending to humans enhances the influence of attention-control regions on the fusiform face area.