FriSem

Marisa Nordt, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

2021 Fall Neuroscience Postdoc

Title: Cortical recycling in high-level visual cortex during childhood development

Abstract: Human ventral temporal cortex (VTC) contains category-selective regions that respond preferentially to ecologically relevant categories such as faces, bodies, places and words and that are causally involved in the perception of these categories. How do these regions develop during childhood? In this talk, I will present our recent work in which we addressed this question in a longitudinal study. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure longitudinal development of category selectivity in school-age children over 1 to 5 years. We discovered that, from young childhood to the teens, face- and word-selective regions in ventral temporal cortex expand and become more category selective, but limb-selective regions shrink and lose their preference for limbs. Critically, as a child develops, increases in face and word selectivity are directly linked to decreases in limb selectivity, revealing that during childhood, limb selectivity in ventral temporal cortex is repurposed into word and face selectivity. These results provide evidence for cortical recycling during childhood development. I will end the talk by showing complementary analyses that examine the longitudinal development of distributed category representations in VTC.

You can find this information on the talk here.