Mistaking a house for a face: neural correlates of misperception in healthy humans.
Individuals with normal vision can sometimes momentarily mistake one object for another. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated how extrastriate visual regions respond during these erroneous perceptual judgements. Subjects were asked to discriminate images of houses and faces that were degraded such that they were close to an individually defined threshold for perception. On correct trials, voxels localized on the inferior occipital (OFA), fusiform (FFA) and parahippocampal (PPA) gyri exhibited selectivity for face and house images as expected. On incorrect trials, no face- or place-selectivity was observed for OFA or PPA. However, consistent with 'predictive coding' accounts of perception, we observed that the FFA also responded robustly on trials where a house was misperceived as a face, and concurrent activation was observed in medio-frontal and right parietal regions previously implicated in decision making under uncertainty. We suggest that FFA responses during misperception may be driven by a predictive top-down signal from these regions.
Summerfield
Christopher
C
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 406 Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027, USA. summerfd@paradox.columbia.edu
Egner
Tobias
T
Mangels
Jennifer
J
Hirsch
Joy
J
D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology*