The Functional Organization Of Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus:An FMRI Study

The posterior superior temporal sulcus(p STS),which is usually reported to be involved in social cognitive processes such as processing facial information,perceiving biological motion,and perceiving social interactions,is known as the key hub of the ’social brain’.However,there are still many controversies when defining p STS as the region of interest(ROI).We summarized three types of functional localizers about p STS: face localizer,biological motion localizer,and social interaction localizer.We found that the response areas of these three types of tasks were distributed in anterior,middle and posterior along p STS.Next,we designed experiments to further verify the inconsistency of localizers.The results showed that there were significant differences in success rate,t‐value of the peak voxel and cluster size.The cluster analysis also reflected the same results of the meta-analysis.Specifically,the area activated by biological motion was more posterior,the area activated by social interaction was more middle,and our findings indicate that the selectivity for dynamic face was represented in regionally specific brain regions along the STS,with the preference increasing as one moves anteriorly.Finally,for the social interaction functional localizer,we analyzed in detail the feasibility of the sub-category social interaction paradigm,and found the ROI activated by comprehensive social interaction is the only area that can decode social interaction across categories.All in all,we recruited subjects to complete three typical p STS localizer tasks,avoiding the influence of individual differences in meta-analysis.We found that the ROIs created by these tasks is different for individuals.Importantly,we provide a standard paradigm that can help us localize p STS interaction-selective area.