Nancy Kanwisher: The Functional Architecture of Human Intelligence

Topics: Is the functional organization of the brain based on special-purpose vs. general-purpose machinery? Brief history of efforts to find specialized machinery (Spearman, Gall, lesion studies); introduction to fMRI methods and data; validation of fMRI through replication of physiological results; using fMRI to identify specialized face areas, with appropriate controls for other functions; response properties in the fusiform face area; selective cortical regions for color, scenes, movement, human body and parts, pitch, speech sounds, meaning of a sentence, theory of mind, complex thinking; future directions for fMRI studies