ArticleBrain and behavior2016
Pruning or tuning? Maturational profiles of face specialization during typical development.
Article in Brain and behavior, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visual and Auditory Object Representations in Ventral Visual Cortex After Restoring Sight in Humans.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Classification of evoked responses to inverted faces reveals both spatial and temporal cortical response abnormalities in Autism spectrum disorder.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Article
- Pruning or tuning? Maturational profiles of face specialization during typical development.Brain and behavior · 2016Article
- Sex differences in development of functional connections in the face processing network.Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of NeuroimagingArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionFace processing undergoes significant developmental change with age. Two kinds of developmental changes in face specialization were examined in this study: specialized maturation, or the continued tuning of a region to faces but little change in the tuning to other categories; and competitive interactions, or the continued tuning to faces accompanied by decreased tuning to nonfaces (i.e., pruning).
methodsUsing fMRI, in regions where adults showed a face preference, a face- and object-specialization index were computed for younger children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years) and adults (18-45 years). The specialization index was scaled to each subject's maximum activation magnitude in each region to control for overall age differences in the activation level.
resultsAlthough no regions showed significant face specialization in the younger age group, regions strongly associated with social cognition (e.g., right posterior superior temporal sulcus, right inferior orbital cortex) showed specialized maturation, in which tuning to faces increased with age but there was no pruning of nonface responses. Conversely, regions that are associated with more basic perceptual processing or motor mirroring (right middle temporal cortex, right inferior occipital cortex, right inferior frontal opercular cortex) showed competitive interactions in which tuning to faces was accompanied by pruning of object responses with age.
conclusionsThe overall findings suggest that cortical maturation for face processing is regional-specific and involves both increased tuning to faces and diminished response to nonfaces. Regions that show competitive interactions likely support a more generalized function that is co-opted for face processing with development, whereas regions that show specialized maturation increase their tuning to faces, potentially in an activity-dependent, experience-driven manner.
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