Revisiting the role of the fusiform face area in visual expertise

It has previously been reported (Gauthier et al., 2000, Nat. Neurosci., 3:191-197) in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that objects of visual expertise (cars and birds) activate the right fusiform face area (FFA) more strongly than non-expertise stimuli, and it was argued that the right FFA is involved in expertise specific rather than face specific visual processing. This expertise effect, however, may be due to experts taking advantage of the 'faceness' of the stimuli: birds have faces and three-quarter frontal views of cars resemble faces. This expertise effect may also be caused by a biased attentional modulation: with a blocked fMRI design, experts may attend more to a block of expertise than a block of non-expertise stimuli. In this study, using both side-view car images that do not resemble faces and bird images in an event-related fMRI design that minimizes attentional modulation, an expertise effect in the right FFA is observed in both car and bird experts (although a baseline bias makes the bird expertise effect less reliable). These results are consistent with those of Gauthier et al., and suggest the involvement of the right FFA in processing non-face expertise visual stimuli.