Face-specific responses from the human inferior occipito-temporal cortex.

Whole-head neuromagnetic responses were recorded from seven subjects to pictures of faces and to various control stimuli. Four subjects displayed signals specific to faces. The combination of functional information from magnetoencephalography and anatomical data from magnetic resonance images suggests that the face-specific activity was generated in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex. All four subjects showed the face-specific response in the right hemisphere, one of them also in the left. Our results, together with recent position emission tomography and lesion studies, suggest a right-hemisphere preponderance of face processing in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex.