The end point of the ventral visual stream: face and non-face perceptual deficits following unilateral anterior temporal lobe damage

Abstract

While it has been claimed that the ventral visual stream ends in the inferior aspects of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), little is known about whether this region is important for visual perception. Here the performance of two patients with unilateral ATL damage was assessed across four visual perception tasks that parametrically varied stimulus similarity. Patients performed normally on difficult judgments of circle size or face age but were impaired on face identity and dot pattern matching tasks. Portions of the ATL, most likely the ventral surface, may have a functional role in visual perception tasks requiring detailed configural processing, most commonly used to discern facial identity.

Keywords:

• face perception
• prosopagnosia
• perirhinal cortex
• temporal pole

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David Drowos and Govinda Vyas for assistance with testing and figure creation. We would also like to thank our patient group who generously donated their time.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Institute of Health grant to I. Olson [grant number RO1 MH091113].