Grant: Operating Grant

How the brain extracts meaning from the visual world remains a mysterious process, particularly in the case of complex objects like the human face. The face is one of the best examples of the challenging high-level object recognition tasks we perform: not only is its shape intricate, but it can convey a wide variety of information, including age, gender, expression and identity, among others. A dominant theory is that this information is not all processed by a single region, but dispersed to specialized modules. This may be particularly true for expression and identity. Our goal is to test hypotheses generated by this concept, using patients with brain lesions and functional imaging, to determine if the evidence supports this modular view of face processing by the brain. This may shed light on the different processing problems experienced by patients with different types of strokes and may help pinpoint the systems that are dysfunctional in other diseases that may affect face processing, like autism and Asperger syndrome.