Daniel Elbich, Dr. Suzanne Scherf, and their collaborators have recently published work on functional connectivity within face processing network. In this paper, young adults were scanned with fMRI as they viewed movies of faces, objects, and scenes. During face processing, they observed directional connections from the right posterior superior temporal sulcus to both the right occipital face area and right fusiform face area (FFA), which does not reflect the topology reported in prior studies. They also observed connectivity between core and extended regions during face processing, but this limited to a feedforward connection from the FFA to the amygdala. Finally, the topology of connections was unique to face processing. These findings suggest that the pattern of directed functional connections within the face processing network, particularly in the right core regions, may not be as hierarchical and feed-forward as described previously.
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