Early widespread cortical distribution of coherent fusiform face selective activity.

Intracranial EEG was analyzed from 16 pharmaco-resistant epilepsy patients. Subjects participated in memory tasks for faces and/or words. Face-selective coherence increases were found between the fusiform gyrus and temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices at 160-230 ms poststimulus onset. Word stimuli elicited weak or negligible response at the same latency. Phase lag increased monotonically with distance from the fusiform region. The slope was consistent with conduction velocities of myelinated cortico-cortical pathways. These results suggest that the contribution of the fusiform gyrus to face processing at around 200 ms poststimulus onset is rapidly projected to widespread cortical regions.