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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on April 9, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(1):13-23; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn048
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© 2008 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Activity in Face-Responsive Brain Regions is Modulated by Invisible, Attended Faces: Evidence from Masked Priming

Sid Kouider1,2, Evelyn Eger2, Raymond Dolan3 and Richard N. Henson4

1 Laboratoire des Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS/EHESS/DEC-ENS, 75005 Paris, France, 2 Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Neurospin center, INSERM/SHFJ/CEA, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France, 3 Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, WC1N 3BG London, UK, 4 Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, CB2 7EF Cambridge, UK

Address correspondence to Dr Sid Kouider PhD, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France. Email: sid.kouider{at}ens.fr.

It is often assumed that neural activity in face-responsive regions of primate cortex correlates with conscious perception of faces. However, whether such activity occurs without awareness is still debated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with a novel masked face priming paradigm, we observed neural modulations that could not be attributed to perceptual awareness. More specifically, we found reduced activity in several classic face-processing regions, including the "fusiform face area," "occipital face area," and superior temporal sulcus, when a face was preceded by a briefly flashed image of the same face, relative to a different face, even when 2 images of the same face differed. Importantly, unlike most previous studies, which have minimized awareness by using conditions of inattention, the present results occurred when the stimuli (the primes) were attended. By contrast, when primes were perceived consciously, in a long-lag priming paradigm, we found repetition-related activity increases in additional frontal and parietal regions. These data not only demonstrate that fMRI activity in face-responsive regions can be modulated independently of perceptual awareness, but also document where such subliminal face-processing occurs (i.e., restricted to face-responsive regions of occipital and temporal cortex) and to what extent (i.e., independent of the specific image).

Key Words: fMRI • fusiform face area • implicit memory • priming • subliminal perception


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