LEAD

Gary COTTRELL

UCSD, San Diego, visiting professor au LEAD

Solving the visual expertise mystery: Why is the fusiform face area recruited for other domains of expertise?

Brain imaging studies have identified the fusiform face area (FFA) as a face-specific processing area. Recent work, however, has shown that the FFA is also responsive to wide Variety of non-face objects if levels of discrimination and expertise are controlled. The mystery is why an expertise area, whose initial domain of expertise is presumably faces, would be recruited for these other areas of expertise. Here we show that neural networks trained to do fine level discrimination of homogeneous categories have high variance responses across that class. This variability generalizes to other homogeneous classes, providing a foothold for learning. By popular demand, there'll be no equations in this talk!