, 2000; Haxby et al., 2000 and Haxby et al., 2002) such as mouth, eye and head movements (Lee et al., 2010) and facial expressions (Phillips et al., 1997): although it does respond to pictures of static faces (Hoffman and Haxby, 2000 and Kanwisher et al., 1997), it shows a response of

significantly greater magnitude (up to three times) to dynamic as compared to static faces (Pitcher, Dilks, Saxe, Triantafyllou, & Kanwisher, 2011). Thus, it could be that continuously presenting only moving faces heightened the response in the pSTS and attenuated the response in the FFA. We further generalized this approach to all conditions and identified ‘people-selective’ regions in our group of participants as those that responded to social stimuli in all conditions, whether this was audiovisual, audio only or visual only. Such regions were found bilaterally in the GW-572016 chemical structure pSTS to mid-STS, in addition to the right aSTS, the IFG, hippocampus and precuneus. In a pioneering study, Kreifelts et al. (2009) examined voice-selectivity, face-selectivity and integration of affective information within the STS. They found, using fMRI, that the neural representations of the audiovisual integration of non-verbal emotional signals, voice sensitivity and face sensitivity were located in different

parts of the STS with maximum voice sensitivity in the trunk section and maximum face sensitivity in the posterior terminal Selleckchem MK-1775 17-DMAG (Alvespimycin) HCl ascending branch. These authors did not observe the large overlap as was seen

in our study, and we can only speculate as to some of the possible reasons. We predict the large response of the STG was in part due to contrasting dynamic audiovisual presentations of people against audiovisual presentations of objects, plus unimodal face and voice information – thus, these would have activated the portions of the STG/STS responsive to audiovisual information, in addition to those responsive to dynamic face information and voice-selective regions. In the study by Kreifelts, face and voice-selectivity were examined using separate localisers, which simply contrasted the response to different sets of unimodal stimuli. What is more, in their face-localiser, the authors only used static faces. Although static faces can also activate the STS (Haxby et al., 2000 and Kanwisher et al., 1997) dynamic faces are known to evoke a more pronounced response in this region. In summary, we find that in this experiment, a large part of the STS – extending from pSTS to aSTS – was overall ‘people selective’: this is striking, considering that previous research has localised face-selectivity and voice-selectivity in different, mostly non-overlapping portions of this region, specifically the pSTS and mid-STS to aSTS, respectively. We used a conjunction analysis and the classical ‘max criterion’ to define integrative, audiovisual regions in our study.