Development of the macaque face-patch system.

Face recognition is highly proficient in humans and other social primates; it emerges in infancy, but the development of the neural mechanisms supporting this behaviour is largely unknown. We use blood-volume functional MRI to monitor longitudinally the responsiveness to faces, scrambled faces, and objects in macaque inferotemporal cortex (IT) from 1 month to 2 years of age. During this time selective responsiveness to monkey faces emerges. Some functional organization is present at 1 month; face-selective patches emerge over the first year of development, and are remarkably stable once they emerge. Face selectivity is refined by a decreasing responsiveness to non-face stimuli.

Noninvasive functional MRI in alert monkeys.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is now widely used to study human brain function. Alert monkey fMRI experiments have been used to localize functions and to compare the workings of the human and monkey brains. Monkey fMRI poses considerable challenges because of the monkey's small brain and naturally uncooperative disposition. While training can encourage monkeys to be more obliging during scanning, the usual procedure is to hold the monkey's head motionless by means of a surgically implanted head post. Such implants are invasive and require regular maintenance. In order to overcome these problems we developed a technique for holding monkeys' heads motionless during scanning using a custom-fitted plastic helmet, a chin strap, and a mild suction supplied by a vacuum blower. This vacuum helmet method is totally noninvasive and has shown no adverse effects after repeated use for several months. The motion of a trained monkey's head in the helmet during scanning was comparable to that of a trained monkey implanted with a conventional head post.

Perceptual and physiological evidence for a role for early visual areas in motion-induced blindness.

Visual disappearance illusions, such as motion-induced blindness, are commonly used to study the neural correlates of visual perception. In such illusions a salient visual target becomes perceptually invisible. Previous studies are inconsistent regarding the role of early visual areas in these illusions. Here we provide physiological and psychophysical evidence suggesting a role for early visual areas in generating motion-induced blindness, and we provide a conceptual model by which different brain areas might contribute to the perceptual disappearance in this illusion.