Timing and tuning for familiarity of cortical responses to faces.

Different kinds of known faces activate brain areas to dissimilar degrees. However, the tuning to type of knowledge, and the temporal course of activation, of each area have not been well characterized. Here we measured, with functional magnetic resonance imaging, brain activity elicited by unfamiliar, visually familiar, and personally-familiar faces.

Covert face recognition without the fusiform-temporal pathways.

Patients with prosopagnosia are unable to recognize faces consciously, but when tested indirectly they can reveal residual identification abilities. The neural circuitry underlying this covert recognition is still unknown. One candidate for this function is the partial survival of a pathway linking the fusiform face area (FFA) and anterior-inferior temporal (AIT) cortex, which has been shown to be essential for conscious face identification.

Hemispheric modulations of alpha-band power reflect the rightward shift in attention induced by enhanced attentional load.

Rightward shifts in attention are a common consequence of brain injury. A growing body of evidence appears to suggest that increases in attentional load, and decreases in alertness can lead to rightward shifts in attention in healthy and patient populations. It is unclear however whether these factors affect spatial biases in attention at the level of preparatory control processes or at the level of stimulus driven expression mechanisms.

Right impairment of temporal order judgements in dyslexic children.

This study investigates the spatial bias of visual attention measured by a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task and the influence of a high attentional load condition in a group of dyslexic children compared to a control group with normal reading skills (each group N=10). The TOJ task (T2) was placed after a shape discrimination task (T1). In a low attentional load block participants worked only on T2, whereas in the high attentional load block they were required to process both T1 and T2.