Sugase-Miyamoto Yasuko National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

In our social life, we can easily recognize a person’s age and physical conditions based on the information of the facial shitsukan, e.g., textures of facial skin, eyes and hair. This ability is assumed to be based on neural processing in areas participating in the analysis of visual characteristics of faces in the temporal lobe. Functional MRI has revealed several interconnected cortical regions that consist of face-selective neurons, i.e., face patches, and regions that represent material properties of objects along the ventral visual pathway. We will investigate the information processing of facial shitsukan within and outside of these face selective regions.