Dynamic face-related eye movement representations in the human ventral pathway

Abstract

Multiple brain areas along the ventral pathway have been known to represent face images. Here, in a magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment, we show dynamic representations of face-related eye movements in the ventral pathway in the absence of image perception. Participants followed a dot presented on a uniform background, the movement of which represented gaze tracks acquired previously during their free-viewing of face and house pictures. We found a dominant role of the ventral stream in representing face-related gaze tracks, starting from the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and anterior temporal lobe (ATL), and extending to the medial temporal and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Our findings show that the ventral pathway represents the gaze tracks used to explore faces, by which top-down prediction of face category in OFC and ATL may guide, via the medial temporal cortex or directly, face perception in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex.