The goal of the proposed research is to study the normal development of inferotemporal cortex in infant macaques and to compare normally reared animals to animals who have had drastically altered early visual experience. In adult humans and monkeys discrete regions of the temporal lobe are specialized for processing particular object categories, such as faces, text, bodies, or places. It is unknown how this specialization emerges, and it is not known what the functional significance is of having such specialized domains. To determine and map the earliest organizing principles of inferotemporal cortex, infant monkeys will be scanned, starting at birth, then repeatedly during development, using functional MRI. Our laboratory has developed techniques for scanning alert infant monkeys that are entirely non-invasive, and not harmful to the monkeys; we have demonstrated success in scanning animals young enough that the entire cortical visual pathway is still immature. It will be of fundamental importance to discover what kind aspects of the organization are innate and which are driven by experience.
Our goal is to define the normal early development of large-scale functional organization of the macaque brain, with emphasis on the object recognition pathway. These studies will complement, integrate with, and extend studies of human development, in that monitoring looking behavior and functional connectivity MRI extend to monkeys the kinds of developmental studies that have been extensively documented in developing human infants, whereas monitoring the functional development of the visual pathway and asking how abnormal experience alters this development cannot be done in humans. It is important to know how much of the machinery for visual recognition is innate and what aspects of the circuitry require experience for normal development.
| Livingstone, Margaret S; Vincent, Justin L; Arcaro, Michael J et al. (2017) Development of the macaque face-patch system. Nat Commun 8:14897 |
| Arcaro, Michael J; Livingstone, Margaret S (2017) Retinotopic Organization of Scene Areas in Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex. J Neurosci 37:7373-7389 |
| Ponce, Carlos R; Hartmann, Till S; Livingstone, Margaret S (2017) End-Stopping Predicts Curvature Tuning along the Ventral Stream. J Neurosci 37:648-659 |
| Arcaro, Michael J; Schade, Peter F; Vincent, Justin L et al. (2017) Seeing faces is necessary for face-domain formation. Nat Neurosci 20:1404-1412 |
| Arcaro, Michael J; Livingstone, Margaret S (2017) A hierarchical, retinotopic proto-organization of the primate visual system at birth. Elife 6: |
