Cosimo Urgesi, Beatriz Calvo-Merino, Patrick Haggard, and Salvatore M. Aglioti
Visual recognition of the human form is easier when the figure is upright, rather than standing on its head. In fact, it seems there is a cortical region for this task. The extrastriate body area (EBA) in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex prefers bodies upright and can distinguish body parts as well as whole bodies. In this weeks Journal, Urgesi et al. asked whether body recognition processing is configural, as the inversion effect suggests, or local" The authors used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to interfere with premotor, visual, and parietal areas during visual body processing. Disruption of configural processing by ventral premotor cortex stimulation interfered with recognition of upright, but not inverted figures. Stimulation of EBA in contrast interfered with local processing, disrupting recognition of inverted but not upright bodies or body parts. The results pointed to parallel cortical processing pathways for recognition of the human form.
W. Michael Caudle, Jason R. Richardson, Min Z. Wang, Tonya N. Taylor, Thomas S. Guillot, Alison L. McCormack, Rebecca E. Colebrooke, Donato A. Di Monte, Piers C. Emson, and Gary W. Miller
The vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2) packs intracellular vesicles with dopamine for the obvious purpose of neurotransmission. However, this cytosolic scavenging also potentially serves to protect cells from the toxic effects of monoamines. In fact, VMAT is a member of the toxin-ex
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Contact: Sara Harris
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Society for Neuroscience
24-Jul-2007