Center for BrainHealth(®) and School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083-0688, USA.
Neurosci Lett. 2011 Jul 20;499(2):64-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2011.05.033. Epub 2011 May 23.
The human visual system responds to expertise, and it has been suggested that regions that process faces also process other objects of expertise including chess boards by experts. We tested whether chess and face processing overlap in brain activity using fMRI. Chess experts and novices exhibited face selective areas, but these regions showed no selectivity to chess configurations relative to other stimuli. We next compared neural responses to chess and to scrambled chess displays to isolate areas relevant to expertise. Areas within the posterior cingulate, orbitofrontal cortex, and right temporal cortex were active in this comparison in experts over novices. We also compared chess and face responses within the posterior cingulate and found this area responsive to chess only in experts. These findings indicate that the configurations in chess are not strongly processed by face-selective regions that are selective for faces in individuals who have expertise in both domains. Further, the area most consistently involved in chess did not show overlap with faces. Overall, these results suggest that expert visual processing may be similar at the level of recognition, but need not show the same neural correlates.
人类视觉系统对专业知识有反应，有人认为，处理面部的区域也处理其他专业知识的对象，包括专家的棋盘。我们使用 fMRI 测试了大脑活动中是否存在下棋和处理面部的重叠。国际象棋专家和新手都表现出了对脸部有选择性的区域，但这些区域相对于其他刺激物，对国际象棋的布局没有选择性。接下来，我们比较了专家和新手对国际象棋和打乱的国际象棋显示的神经反应，以分离与专业知识相关的区域。在专家中，后扣带皮层、眶额皮层和右侧颞叶皮层内的区域在这种比较中表现出活跃，而在新手中则没有。我们还比较了后扣带皮层内的国际象棋和面部反应，发现该区域只有在专家中才对国际象棋有反应。这些发现表明，在具有这两个领域专业知识的个体中，选择面部的面部选择性区域对面棋的布局处理不强烈。此外，最常涉及国际象棋的区域与面部没有重叠。总的来说，这些结果表明，专家的视觉处理在识别水平上可能相似，但不一定表现出相同的神经相关性。
