Activity in the fusiform face area supports expert perception inradiologists, and does not depend upon holistic processing of images

摘要

Training in radiology dramatically changes observers' ability to process images, but the neural bases of this visualexpertise remain unexplored. Prior imaging work has suggested that the fusiform face area (FFA), normally selectivelyresponsive to faces, becomes responsive to images in observers' area of expertise. The FFA has been hypothesized to beimportant for "holistic" processing that integrates information across the entire image. Here, we report a cross-sectionalstudy of radiologists that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in first-year radiologyresidents, fourth-year radiology residents, and practicing radiologists as they detected abnormalities in chest radiographs.Across subjects, activity in the FFA correlated with visual expertise, measured as behavioral performance duringscanning. To test whether processing in the FFA was holistic, we measured its responses both to intact radiographs andradiographs that had been divided into 25 square pieces whose locations were scrambled. Activity in the FFA was equalin magnitude for intact and scrambled images, and responses to both kinds of stimuli correlated reliably with expertise.These results suggest that the FFA is one of the cortical regions that provides the basis of expertise in radiology, but thatits contribution is not holistic processing of images.