Common patterns of spatial selectivity in early visual cortex and face-selective brain regions

Face recognition relies on dedicated brain regions with unique selectivity, including sensitivity to face inversion. The spatial selectivity of these regions has similarly been argued to be either unique or wholly invariant to face location, contrary to accounts of common ‘visuospatial coding’ whereby high-level category-selective areas inherit spatial properties from earlier regions. Because early cortical regions (V1-V3) show characteristic retinotopic variations, with greater cortical sampling along the horizontal vs. vertical meridian and in the lower vs. upper field, we examined whether face-selective regions (OFA, pFus, mFus) share these spatial anisotropies, and whether these properties could drive observed variations in face perception. Large-field upright and inverted face stimuli (±21° eccentricity) were used for retinotopic mapping and population receptive field (pRF) analyses. While pRFs were considerably larger in face-selective regions than in V1-V3, their size did not vary consistently in the direction of behavioural anisotropies. However, both early and face-selective areas showed higher pRF numbers and a concomitant increase in visual field coverage along the horizontal vs. vertical meridian and in the lower vs. upper field. Variations in face-recognition abilities around the visual field could therefore reflect these sampling differences. We also show that pRF numbers in mFus were greater for upright than inverted faces, which could in part support the perceptual advantage for upright faces. These shared variations in visual field sampling between face-selective and early visual cortex support a hierarchical model whereby the spatial selectivity of higher-level areas builds on that of earlier regions, even for specialised face processing.