Patterns of activity during haptic face recognition: an fMRI study

Major focus in neuroimaging regarding Face processing was made to the visual modality providing evidence for specific processing areas that involve with perceptual expertise. Growing evidence suggests that humans can also learn and recognize faces by touch alone. However, little is known about the neural correlates underlying such haptic face recognition. In order to investigate this we scanned 9 healthy subjects, using 3 T fMRI while they performed a previously described face encoding-retrieval task. Briefly, in an old/new recognition task, participants were haptically introduced to three facemasks (3D small scale resin made human face masks) while inside the scanner. This encoding phase was immediately followed by a retrieval phase in which participants were presented with the three former introduced masks and three other similar comparison facemasks consecutively in pseudorandom order. Subjects were instructed to determine whether the mask was introduced in the encoding phase or not. in the poster we will cover the neural BOLD correlates of face encoding and face retrieval