DOI 10.1007/s00221-009-1721-9RESEARCH ARTICLE Natural facial motion enhances cortical responses to faces

Abstract The ability to perceive facial motion is impor-tant to successfully interact in social environments. Previ-ously, imaging studies have investigated neural correlates of facial motion primarily using abstract motion stimuli. Here, we studied how the brain processes natural non-rigid facial motion in direct comparison to static stimuli and matched phase-scrambled controls. As predicted from pre-vious studies, dynamic faces elicit higher responses than static faces in lateral temporal areas corresponding to hMT+/V5 and STS. Interestingly, individually deWned, static-face-sensitive regions in bilateral fusiform gyrus and left inferior occipital gyrus also respond more to dynamic than static faces. These results suggest integration of form and motion information during the processing of dynamic faces even in ventral temporal and inferior lateral occipital areas. In addition, our results show that dynamic stimuli are a robust tool to localize areas related to the processing of static and dynamic face information