Visual feature integration and the role of attention in the fusiform face area

The integration of individual features is an important process for the perception of an object. Higher visual areas of the ventral visual pathway have been shown to play a critical role in the integration of local features into a global shape and process information rather at a global than local scale. However, local preference can be achieved by attentional modulation. At the current stage the impact of attention remains unclear. In an event-related fMRI study, we investigated integration mechanisms of higher visual areas in healthy subjects. We compared the neural activity in the fusiform face area (FFA) to fa…