Spiridon Mona, Kanwisher Nancy
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NE20-464 Cambridge 02139, USA.
Neuron. 2002 Sep 12;35(6):1157-65. doi: 10.1016/s0896-6273(02)00877-2.
We used fMRI to study the distribution of object category information in the ventral visual pathway. Extending the findings of, we find that categories of stimuli can be distinguished by the pattern of activation they elicit across this entire pathway, even when the stimuli within a category differ in viewpoint, exemplar, or image format. However, regions within the ventral visual pathway are neither interchangeable nor equipotential. Although the FFA and PPA permit excellent discrimination between preferred versus nonpreferred stimuli (e.g., faces-bottles and houses-bottles, respectively), we find that neither region alone permits accurate discrimination between pairs of nonpreferred stimuli (e.g., bottles-shoes). These findings indicate that the ventral visual pathway is not homogeneous, but contains some regions (including FFA and PPA) that are primarily involved in the analysis of a single class of stimulus.
我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来研究腹侧视觉通路中物体类别信息的分布。扩展之前的研究结果，我们发现即使同一类别中的刺激在视角、范例或图像格式上有所不同，通过它们在整个通路中引发的激活模式仍可区分刺激类别。然而，腹侧视觉通路中的区域既不可互换也不等效。尽管梭状回面孔区（FFA）和旁海马区（PPA）分别在区分偏好刺激与非偏好刺激（例如，面孔-瓶子和房子-瓶子）方面表现出色，但我们发现单独一个区域都无法准确区分非偏好刺激对（例如，瓶子-鞋子）。这些发现表明腹侧视觉通路并非均匀一致，而是包含一些主要参与单一类刺激分析的区域（包括FFA和PPA）。
