title: A direct measure of human lateral temporal lobe neurons responsive to face matching.
abstract: Do the human cerebral hemispheres process faces differently? Clinical lesion observations and primate studies suggest that the right temporal lobe is critical in face processing. Yet, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. Recording from single neurons during a visuospatial (VS)-matching paradigm, we found that 100% of significantly active neurons discriminated matching from perception, bilaterally. Lateralized differences in the nature and timing of responses revealed that the right hemisphere neurons responded earlier, and with uniform frequency reductions. Additional lateralized differences favoring the right hemisphere neurons were found when subjects matched intact faces compared to scrambled faces or complex objects. We conclude that widely distributed neural ensembles are involved in 'lateralized' behaviors, but cerebral specialization of face processing is as much a function of the nature and timing of neuronal activity as anatomic location.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Washington, 1959 N.E. Pacific Street, Box 356470, Seattle, WA 98195-6470, USA.
authors.forename: Timothy H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Lucas
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schoenfield-McNeill
authors.forename: Peter B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Weber
authors.forename: George A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Ojemann
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005145:Face; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology