Michael Arcaro
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania

BRB 251 and via Zoom

How IT cortex gets its spots

We are remarkably good at recognizing objects and faces in our environment, even after just a brief glimpse. How do we develop the neural circuitry that supports such robust perception? The biological importance of faces for social primates and the stereotyped location of face-selective brain regions across individuals has engendered the idea that face regions are innate neural structures. I will present data challenging this view, where ventral-stream modules do not represent clusters of circuits that each evolved to process some specific object category but instead reflect the effects of experience on a domain-general architecture that evolved to be able to adapt, within a lifetime, to its particular environment. Within this framework, topographic maps play a fundamental role, governing the development of specializations across systems and providing an early scaffolding that guides postnatal experience-driven modifications.