Study Provides Insight Into How the Brain Processes Shape and Color

A new study comparing  brain responses to faces and objects with responses to colors reveals new information about how the brain’s inferior temporal cortex processes information. The study used non-invasive fMRI to measure responses across the brains of rhesus monkeys to a range of different stimuli and obtained responses to images of objects, faces, places and colored stripes. “Shape and color are both properties of objects and are processed by the parts of the brain known to be important for detecting and discriminating objects. However, the way this part of brain is organized has not been clear … ,” Bevil Conway, Wellesley Associate Professor of Neuroscience and one of the paper’s authors, said. “Our work showed that, to a large extent, color and faces are handled by separate, parallel streams, and that these pieces of information are processed by connected, serial stages.” Click here to read the full article.