The fusiform face area responds selectively to faces and is causally involved in face perception. How does face-selectivity in the fusiform arise in development, and why does it develop so systematically in the same location across individuals? Preferential cortical responses to faces develop early in infancy, yet evidence is conflicting on the central question of whether visual experience with faces is necessary. Here, we revisit this question by scanning congenitally blind individuals with fMRI while they haptically explored 3D-printed faces and other stimuli. We found robust face-selective responses in the lateral fusiform gyrus of individual blind participants during haptic exploration of stimuli, indicating that neither visual experience with faces nor fovea-biased inputs is necessary for face-selectivity to arise in the lateral fusiform gyrus. Our results instead suggest a role for long-range connectivity in specifying the location of face-selectivity in the human brain.

梭状面部区域选择性地对面部做出反应，并因果性地参与面部感知。梭形的面部选择性在发育过程中是如何产生的？为什么它会在个体的同一位置如此系统地发育？对面部的优先皮质反应在婴儿期早期就已形成，但关于面部视觉体验是否必要这一核心问题，证据是相互矛盾的。在这里，我们通过功能磁共振成像扫描先天性失明的人，同时让他们通过触觉探索 3D 打印的面孔和其他刺激，从而重新审视这个问题。我们发现，在刺激的触觉探索过程中，盲人参与者的外侧梭状回中出现了强烈的面部选择性反应，这表明，面部视觉体验和中央凹偏向输入对于外侧梭状回中出现面部选择性都不是必需的。相反，我们的结果表明，远程连接在指定人脑中面部选择性的位置方面发挥着作用。