Tiago Mesquita¹ (), Gargi Majumdar¹, Waqar Khan^1,2, Anuhya Nalluri², Sunitha Lingareddy³, Ramesh Kekunnaya², Brigitte Röder^1,2; ¹Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg, ²Jasti V Ramanamma Children’s Eye Center, Child Sight Institute, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, India, ³Lucid Medical Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India

Recent studies have demonstrated that face-selective regions in the ventral occipital temporal cortex (VOTC) receive visual information mainly from central vision whereas place-selective regions show a preference for the peripheral visual field. While the basic retinotopy in early visual cortex seems to be established by mid-childhood or earlier, this foveal bias in face-selective regions seems to emerge with a longer developmental trajectory. While category-selective regions in the VOTC have been observed in infants, the role of experience in the emergence of these retinal biases in the VOTC is still unknown. A first step in addressing this question is to demonstrate the foveal bias for face-selective regions in VOTC in a different cultural settings (ethnicity). We here adapted a specialized fMRI mapping procedure tailored to map category-selective regions in VTC using Indian faces. Images of faces and places were presented at different visual field locations. Regions of interest (ROI) (fusiform face area (FFA) and parahippocampal place area (PPA)) were identified using a typical localizer paradigm contrasting five different visual categories presented. Next, we computed the population receptive fields (pRFs) within each ROI. We successfully replicated the foveal bias for face processing in the FFA. For place processing, PPA featured a more distributed activation across the visual field. We concluded that retinal biases in FFA are a universal organizing principle. Whether they require early exposure to faces in order to emerge needs to be tested in people who lack such experience, e.g. in people recovering from a transient phase of congenital blindness.