On the basis of their review of the literature, Rogalsky and Hickok [Rogalsky, C., & Hickok, G. The role of Broca's area in sentence comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 1664–1680, 2011] conclude that there is currently no strong evidence for the existence of “sentence-specific processing regions within Broca's area” (p. 1664). Their argument is based, in part, on the observation that many previous studies have failed to detect an effect in the left inferior frontal regions for contrasts between sentences and linguistically degraded control conditions (e.g., lists of unconnected words, lists of nonwords, or acoustically degraded sentence stimuli). Our data largely replicate this lack of activation in inferior frontal regions when traditional random-effects group analyses are conducted but crucially show robust activations in the same data for the same contrasts in almost every subject individually. Thus, it is the use of group analyses in studies of language processing, not the idea that sentences robustly activate frontal regions, that needs to be reconsidered. This reconsideration has important methodological and theoretical implications.

fMRI studies have reported three regions in human ventral visual cortex that respond selectively to faces: the occipital face area (OFA), the fusiform face area (FFA), and a face-selective region in the superior temporal sulcus (fSTS). Here, we asked whether these areas respond to two first-order aspects of the face argued to be important for face perception, face parts (eyes, nose, and mouth), and the T-shaped spatial configuration of these parts. Specifically, we measured the magnitude of response in these areas to stimuli that (i) either contained real face parts, or did not, and (ii) either had veridical face configurations, or did not. The OFA and the fSTS were sensitive only to the presence of real face parts, not to the correct configuration of those parts, whereas the FFA was sensitive to both face parts and face configuration. Further, only in the FFA was the response to configuration and part information correlated across voxels, suggesting that the FFA contains a unified representation that includes both kinds of information. In combination with prior results from fMRI, TMS, MEG, and patient studies, our data illuminate the functional division of labor in the OFA, FFA, and fSTS.

In many situations, people can only compute one stimulus-to-response mapping at a time, suggesting that response selection constitutes a “central processing bottleneck” in human information processing. Using fMRI, we tested whether common or distinct brain regions were involved in response selection across visual and auditory inputs, and across spatial and nonspatial mapping rules. We isolated brain regions involved in response selection by comparing two conditions that were identical in perceptual input and motor output, but differed in the complexity of the mapping rule. In the visual—manual task of Experiment 1, four vertical lines were positioned from left to right, and subjects pressed one of four keys to report which line was unique in length. In the auditory—manual task of Experiment 2, four tones were presented in succession, and subjects pressed one of four keys to report which tone was unique in duration. For both visual and auditory tasks, the mapping between target position and key position was either spatially compatible or incompatible. In the verbal task of Experiment 3, subjects used nonspatial mappings that were either compatible (“same” if colors matched; “different” if they mismatched) or incompatible (the opposite). Extensive activation overlap was observed across all three experiments for incompatible versus compatible mapping in bilateral parietal and frontal regions. Our results indicate that common neural substrates are involved in response selection across input modalities and across spatial and nonspatial domains of stimulus-to-response mapping, consistent with behavioral evidence that response selection is a central process.

Behavioral evidence supports a dissociation between response selection (RS; stimulus-to-response [S—R] mapping) and perceptual discrimination (PD): The former may be subject to a central processing bottleneck, whereas the latter is not (Pashler, 1994). We previously (Jiang & Kanwisher, 2003) identified a set of frontal and parietal regions involved in RS as those that produce a stronger signal when subjects follow a difficult S—R mapping rule than an easy mapping rule. Here, we test whether any of these regions are selectively activated by RS and not perceptual processing, as predicted by the central bottleneck view. In Experiment 1, subjects indicated which of four parallel lines was unique in length; PD was indexed by a higher BOLD response when the discrimination was difficult versus easy. Stimuli and responses were closely matched across conditions. We found that all regions-of-interest (ROIs) engaged by RS were also engaged by perceptual processing, arguing against the existence of mechanisms exclusively involved in RS. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked what processes might go on in these ROIs, such that they could be recruited by both RS and perceptual processing. Our data argue against an account of this common activation in terms of spatial processing or general task difficulty. Thus, PD may recruit the same central processes that are engaged by RS.

A still photograph of an object in motion may convey dynamic information about the position of the object immediately before and after the photograph was taken (implied motion). Medial temporal/medial superior temporal cortex (MT/MST) is one of the main brain regions engaged in the perceptual analysis of visual motion. In two experiments we examined whether MT/MST is also involved in representing implied motion from static images. We found stronger functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation within MT/MST during viewing of static photographs with implied motion compared to viewing of photographs without implied motion. These results suggest that brain regions involved in the visual analysis of motion are also engaged in processing implied dynamic information from static images.

Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to locate an area in human extrastriate cortex that subserves a specific component process of visual object recognition. Regional blood flow increased in a bilateral extrastriate area on the inferolateral surface of the brain near the border between the occipital and temporal lobes (and a smaller area in the right fusiform gyms) when subjects viewed line drawings of 3-dimensional objects compared to viewing scrambled drawings with no clear shape interpretation. Responses were Seen for both novel and familiar objects, implicating this area in the bottom-up (i.e., memory-independent) analysis of visual shape.