Abstract
It is known that a functional site is often activated by various stimuli of different characteristics and that it is hard to determine the functional specificity of such a site. We used a paired stimulus paradigm to probe characteristics of processing activities of various sites in fusiform areas in the ventral visual pathway where the shape of a visual object is recognized. The processing activities induced by a pair of stimuli at a site interact each other if the neural events are temporally close. The interaction appears in most cases as suppression of the neural response to the second inputs of the pair. We observed areas where fairly strong interaction was present between the activities induced by stimuli of different categories such as face and building. On the other hand, those areas known to be very specific to these categories showed very weak interaction in the processing activities by the paired stimuli of the same category but with different contents such as different faces or different buildings. The observation indicates that these category specific sites contain loosely connected sub-sites or neuro-circuits, which work on particular contents in the inputs.
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Sung, YW., Ogawa, S. Characterization of Functional Multiplicity of an Activation Site by the Interaction Among Neuro-Circuits as Probed by fMRI Responses to Different Stimulus Inputs. Brain Imaging and Behavior 3, 1–9 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-008-9043-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-008-9043-2