Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy.
University of Westminster, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Psychology, 115 New Cavendish Street, W1W 6UW London, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Aug;117:364-370. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.06.024. Epub 2018 Jun 30.
In addition to its well-documented role in processing of faces, the occipital face area in the right hemisphere (rOFA) may also play a role in identifying specific individuals within a class of objects. Here we explored this issue by using fMRI-guided TMS. In a first experiment, participants had to judge whether two sequentially presented images of faces or objects represented exactly the same exemplar or two different exemplars of the same class, while receiving online TMS over either the rOFA, the right lateral occipital cortex (rLO) or the Vertex (control). We found that, relative to Vertex, stimulation of rOFA impaired individuation of faces only, with no effect on objects; in contrast, TMS over rLO reduced individuation of objects but not of faces. In a second control experiment participants judged whether a picture representing a fragment of a stimulus belonged or not to the subsequently presented image of a whole stimulus (part-whole matching task). Our results showed that rOFA stimulation selectively disrupted performance with faces, whereas performance with objects (but not with faces) was selectively affected by TMS over rLO. Overall, our findings suggest that rOFA does not contribute to discriminate between exemplars of non-face objects.
除了其在处理面部方面的作用外，右半球的枕面区（rOFA）也可能在识别同一类物体中的特定个体方面发挥作用。在这里，我们通过使用 fMRI 引导的 TMS 来探索这个问题。在第一个实验中，参与者必须判断两张顺序呈现的面孔或物体图像是否代表相同的示例或同一类别的两个不同示例，同时在 rOFA、右侧枕外侧皮质（rLO）或顶点（对照）上接受在线 TMS。我们发现，与顶点相比，rOFA 的刺激仅损害了面孔的个体化，而对物体没有影响；相比之下，rLO 的 TMS 降低了物体的个体化，而不是面孔的个体化。在第二个对照实验中，参与者判断一张代表刺激片段的图片是否属于随后呈现的整个刺激的图片（部分-整体匹配任务）。我们的结果表明，rOFA 的刺激选择性地破坏了面孔的表现，而 rLO 的 TMS 则选择性地影响了物体的表现（但不是面孔）。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明 rOFA 并不有助于区分非面部物体的示例。
