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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

A developmentally retained top-heavy bias for face perception in the adult pulvinar

Xinyi Tang¹, Vladislav Ayzenberg¹; ¹Temple University

Presenter: Xinyi Tang

The ability to rapidly detect faces is critical for human survival. Remarkably, at birth, infants preferentially orient toward upright faces over inverted ones. Yet how this early face preference emerges remains debated. One hypothesis proposes that a nonspecific bias toward top-heavy patterns guides infants’ attention to face-like stimuli early in life, and that such a bias is supported by early-developing subcortical structures, like the pulvinar. To enable direct testing of this hypothesis using fMRI, we designed an infant-friendly paradigm to examine top-heavy biases in the infant pulvinar. Here we validated this paradigm in adults using data amounts comparable to those obtainable from awake infants. With only four minutes of data per task, we found that face-selective responses were localized to cortical face regions at levels comparable to those obtained with a standard localizer. Further, pulvinar subregions connected to cortical face regions, but not cortical face regions themselves, showed stronger responses to top-heavy than bottom-heavy patterns, suggesting that a top-heavy bias persists in the adult pulvinar. Overall, this study establishes the feasibility of identifying face-selective regions using short infant-friendly tasks and provides a foundation for future awake infant fMRI studies of face perception.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations