Rankin Williams McGugin1,
Christopher Gatenby2,3, Isabel Gauthier1
1Psychology, Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, TN, USA; 2Radiology & Radiological
Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA; 3Radiology,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
We imaged the inferior temporal lobe in humans at 7T, using built-in realtime fMRI analysis in combination with the 3D FFE-SENSE sequence to allow for bilateral imaging of the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). We demonstrate robust and reliable functional heterogeneity of the fine-grain neural architecture of bilateral FFA, such that clusters of voxels maximally responsive to non-face categories (irrespective of hemisphere) are spatially interdigitated amongst regions showing maximal response to faces. We demonstrate that a functionally-defined region that appears to be homogenously face-selective at standard resolution (~3mm isotropic) is, in fact, functionally heterogeneous when explored at HR.