Representations of Facial Identity in the Left HemispherernRequire Right Hemisphere Processing

摘要

A quintessential example of hemispheric specialization innthe human brain is that the right hemisphere is specialized fornface perception. However, because the visual system is organizedncontralaterally, what happens when faces appear in thenright visual field and are projected to the nonspecialized leftnhemisphere? We used divided field presentation and fMRI adaptationnto test the hypothesis that the left hemisphere can recognizenfaces, but only with support from the right hemisphere.nConsistent with this hypothesis, facial identity adaptation wasnobserved in the left fusiform face area when a face had previouslynbeen processed by the right hemisphere, but not when itnhad only been processed by the left hemisphere. These resultsnimply that facial identity information is transferred from the rightnhemisphere to the left hemisphere, and that the left hemispherencan represent facial identity but is less efficient at extracting thisninformation by itself.