Tracking down bodies in the brain
By Bruce Bower
A specific patch of tissue on the right side of the brain’s visual cortex takes
charge of recognizing human bodies and body parts, contends a team of researchers
led by psychologist Paul E. Downing of the University of Wales in Bangor. This
body-processing hub lies near one region already linked to face recognition and
not far from another that specializes in telling one place from another, the
scientists say.
The researchers made their find by studying 19 volunteers with a brain-scanning
device that measures surges and declines in blood flow throughout the brain. Those
changes reflect rises and falls in neural activity. When the volunteers viewed
images of human bodies and nonfacial body parts, a small piece of visual cortex
responded much more vigorously than when they viewed images of various nonhuman
and inanimate objects, Downing’s group reports in the Sept. 28 Science.
The findings held regardless of whether participants saw photographs, drawings,
stick figures, or silhouettes of human bodies and body parts. Pictures of either
nonhuman mammals or scrambled versions of human stick figures and silhouettes
elicited a modest activity boost in the proposed body-processing area of the
brain. Activation of the same tissue was lower during displays of fish and other
animals and weaker still for objects such as scissors and screwdriver handles.
Some neuroscientists doubt that separate chunks of the brain are hardwired to
respond only to specific categories of objects (SN: 7/7/01, p. 10: Faces of Perception). The visual
features that make up all sorts of objects draw to some extent on shared territory
in the brain, concludes a separate brain-scanning team led by James V. Haxby of
the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., in another report in the
same issue of Science.
As volunteers view faces, houses, cats, bottles, scissors, shoes, chairs, and
abstract images, the patterns of activity for each overlap in the visual cortex,
Haxby says. In his view, these neural patterns represent perceptions of different
categories of items forged out of their partially shared visual elements.
Isabel Gauthier of Vanderbilt University in Nashville suspects that specific brain
regions solve problems that transcend any one category. Her studies suggest, for
example, that the brain’s proposed face-processing area actually analyzes the
visual characteristics of any class of objects–such as classic cars or bird
species–that a person comes to know extremely well.
The body-processing center studied by Downing’s team also reacts strongly when
volunteers watch groups of dots made to move so that they simulate the motion of a
living thing, Gauthier says. This region may decipher any nearby movements, which
often involve other human bodies, she speculates.
In a concise summary of the research in this area, Michael J. Tarr of Brown
University in Providence, R.I., notes that “there’s no definitive answer at this
point to how object recognition works in the brain.”