title: What types of visual recognition tasks are mediated by the neural subsystem that subserves face recognition?
abstract: Three divided visual field experiments tested current hypotheses about the types of visual shape representation tasks that recruit the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying face recognition. Experiment 1 found a right hemisphere advantage for subordinate but not basic-level face recognition. Experiment 2 found a right hemisphere advantage for basic but not superordinate-level animal recognition. Experiment 3 found that inverting animals eliminates the right hemisphere advantage for basic-level animal recognition. This pattern of results suggests that the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying face recognition are recruited when computational demands of a shape representation task are best served through the use of coordinate (rather than categorical) spatial relations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Graduate Program, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA. bbrooks@mmm.com
authors.forename: Brian E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Brooks
authors.forename: Eric E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Cooper
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology