Flip sides of the same brain: Words and faces are both mediated by universal computational principles

A key issue that continues to generate controversy concerns the nature of the psychological, computational and neural mechanisms that support the visual recognition of objects such as faces and words.  While some researchers claim that visual recognition is accomplished by category-specific modules dedicated to processing distinct object classes, other researchers have argued for a more distributed system with only partially specialized cortical regions.  Considerable evidence from both functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology would seem to favor the modular view, and yet close examination of those data reveal rather graded patterns of specialization that support a more distributed account. This talk presents theoretical and empirical data that explore a theoretical middle ground in which the functional specialization of brain regions arises from general principles and constraints on neural representation and learning that operate throughout cortex but that nonetheless have distinct implications for different classes of stimuli such as faces and words.