Faces are the most important visual stimuli we perceive. They play a paramount role in our everyday social interactions with others. We obtain large amout of information when perceiving faces. Faces inform us not only about a person’s identity, but also about their mood, sex, age and direction of gaze. How brain perceives and processes the face stimuli? One of the evidence came from the syndrome of acquired prosopagnosia, in which neurological patients lose ability to recognize faces after brain damage. Studies from monkeys also show stunning face specificity at both the single-cell level and the level of cortical regions. These evidences suggest there exist a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces. However, due to that the early imaging technology can not provide non-invasive and high temporal-spatial resolution imaging for healthy with large area of cortex, we can not give this issue an explicit answer. Along with the advent and rapid development of the BOLD-fMRI technology, the issues of face perception and recognition have come to a new stage. One of the longest running debates in the history of neuroscience concerns the degree to which specific high-level cognitive functions are implemented in discrete regions of the brain specialized for just that function. The currently popular view think that complex congntive functions are conducted in distributed and overlapping neural networks.For the perception of faces, large amout of evidence supports the hypothesis that face perception is implemented not only in specialized functional regions, but also a distributed cortical network. In this dissertation, the neural mechanism of face perception is investigated by using Blood-oxygen-level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging technique (BOLD-fMRI). Under two important contents: the functional specification and the functional integration, the dissertation will focused on the studies of the face specialized brain regions and the connections and interactions of these regions in different states for discussion. For a long time people have always deemed that without the external stimuli, the activities in the brain are steady and irregular. The recent studies, however, find that some spatially discrete regions show synchronous low frequency-fluctuations. By using spontaneous low-frequency fluctuations in BOLD-fMRI, a set of widely distributed resting-state networks have been identified, with its frequency limited between 0.0...
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