A specific, spindle-shaped gyrus or ‘outfolding’ in the inferior temporal lobe at the junction with area V4 of the visual cortex in the occipital lobe (see figure below) that is mainly responsible for color perception, and which appears to be involved in recognizing faces and objects (but particularly the latter, thus leading to the designation ‘fusiform face area’) with which we have become familiar. Recently, it has been reported that the mid-fusiform gyrus responds with nearly the same level of selectivity to images of human bodies without faces versus tools and scenes. Moreover, other recent work also using functional magnetic imaging has shown it to be active when the task is to discriminate among different types of birds and cars, as well as computer-generated nonsense shapes given the (nonsense) name ‘greebles’ (but not as active as when viewing faces). Pinning down the functions of the fusiform gyrus other than color perception and face recognition has proved to be difficult due to lack of replication between studies. If the fusiform gyrus is damaged, especially bilaterally, it can give rise to prosopagnosia.
