Credit: Katie Ris

In adults, high-level visual cortex includes several regions that seem to be specialized for processing different classes of stimuli, such as faces or objects. However, little is known about the developmental trajectory of these areas or how this progression relates to aptitude in object, face or scene recognition. A paper on page 512 by Golijeh Golarai and colleagues provides an elegant demonstration of the concurrent changes in these specialized cortical regions and recognition memory during development. Their findings suggest that cortical maturation varies temporally across functional regions and is correlated with the development of category-specific recognition memory.

The authors used fMRI to identify areas of the occipito-temporal cortex that preferentially respond to objects (lateral occipital complex, LOC), faces (fusiform face area, FFA) or places (parahippocampal place area, PPA) in children, adolescents and adults. They found that children had smaller face-sensitive and place-sensitive cortical areas than adults, but no age-related changes in the size of object-selective cortical areas. In these same subjects, tests of recognition memory for faces, objects and places revealed that age was correlated with face and place recognition memory, whereas there were no effects of age on memory for objects. Finally, the authors went a step further to show that face recognition memory correlated with the size of the right FFA, and that place recognition memory correlated with the size of the left PPA. Object recognition memory was not correlated with the size of any of the cortical areas of interest.

These changes were specifically associated with improvements in recognition memory for faces and places, but not for objects, suggesting a more prolonged development of the FFA and PPA than the LOC, lasting at least until children reached the age of 11. One possible implication of this finding is that there may be an important role for experience even in the development of high-level visual cortex. In addition, the finding that better recognition memory was associated with increases in the size of specific cortical areas provides hints about the potential coding schemes that could be used in these areas to represent complex stimuli.