The aim of this study was to find the most prominent source of intersubject variability in neuronal activation for reading familiar words aloud. To this end, we collected functional imaging data from a large sample of subjects ( n = 76) with different demographic characteristics such as handedness, sex, and age, while reading. The subject-by-subject error variance was estimated from a one-sample t test (on all 76 subjects) and was reduced to a lower dimension using principal components decomposition. A Gaussian Mixture Model was then applied to dissociate different subgroups of subjects that explained the main sources of variability in the data. This resulted in the identification of four different subject groups. The comparison of these subgroups to the subjects' demographic details showed that age had a significant effect on the subject partitioning. In addition, a region-by-group dissociation in the dorsal and the ventral inferior frontal cortex was consistent with previously reported dissociations in semantic and nonsemantic reading strategies. In contrast to these significant findings, the groupings did not differentiate subjects on the basis of either sex or handedness, nor did they segregate the subjects with right- versus left-lateralized reading activation. We therefore conclude that, of the variables tested, age and reading strategy were the most prominent source of variability in activation for reading familiar words aloud.

Humans can identify individual faces under different viewpoints, even after a single encounter. We determined brain regions responsible for processing face identity across view changes after variable delays with several intervening stimuli, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging during a long-term repetition priming paradigm. Unfamiliar faces were presented sequentially either in a frontal or three-quarter view. Each face identity was repeated once after an unpredictable lag, with either the same or another viewpoint. Behavioral data showed significant priming in response time, irrespective of view changes. Brain imaging results revealed a reduced response in the lateral occipital and fusiform cortex with face repetition. Bilateral face-selective fusiform areas showed view-sensitive repetition effects, generalizing only from three-quarter to front-views. More medial regions in the left (but not in the right) fusiform showed repetition effects across all types of viewpoint changes. These results reveal that distinct regions within the fusiform cortex hold view-sensitive or view-invariant traces of novel faces, and that face identity is represented in a view-sensitive manner in the functionally defined face-selective areas of both hemispheres. In addition, our finding of a better generalization after exposure to a 3/4-view than to a front-view demonstrates for the first time a neural substrate in the fusiform cortex for the common recognition advantage of three-quarter faces. This pattern provides new insights into the nature of face representation in the human visual system.