The Quest for the FFA led to the Expertise Account of its Specialization

TL;DR

This paper reviews evidence supporting the expertise account of the fusiform face area (FFA), emphasizing its role in individuating objects through experience, challenging the view of face-specific processing as innate.

Contribution

It clarifies the distinction between face selectivity and expertise-driven responses in the FFA, highlighting extensive evidence for the influence of perceptual experience.

Findings

FFA responds strongly to non-face objects with which individuals have expertise

Face selectivity in FFA is not present in infants or heritable

Expertise influences neural responses in the FFA

Abstract

This article is written in response to a Progressions article by Kanwisher in the Journal of Neuroscience, The Quest for the FFA and Where It Led (Kanwisher, 2017). I reflect on the extensive research program dedicated to the study of how and why perceptual expertise explains the many ways that faces are special, a research program which both predates and follows the Kanwisher (1997) landmark article where the fusiform face area (FFA) is named. The expertise accounts suggests that the FFA is an area recruited by expertise individuating objects that are perceptually similar because they share a configuration of parts. While Kanwisher (2017) discussed the expertise account only very briefly and only to dismiss it, there is strong and replicable evidence that responses in the FFA are highly sensitive to experience with non-face objects. I point out that Kanwisher was well positioned to present these findings in their historical context as she participated in the design of the first fMRI study on car and bird expertise, as well as the first replication of this finding. Perhaps most relevant to readers interested in the neural bases of face processing, it is important to distinguish studies that describe the phenomenon of face-selectivity from those that test an explanation for this phenomenon. In the Progressions article, arguments for a face-dedicated processing module that is not the result of our experience with faces are provided without attention to a great deal of expertise research which is directly inconsistent with that claim. The claim also lacks more direct support, as face-selective responses in the visual system are not found in infants and children and face-selective activity in FFA does not appear to be heritable.