Toward a New Model of Scientific Publishing: Discussion and a Proposal

The current system of publishing in the biological sciences is notable for its redundancy, inconsistency, sluggishness, and opacity. These problems persist, and grow worse, because the peer review system remains focused on deciding whether or not to publish a paper in a particular journal rather than providing (1) a high-quality evaluation of scientific merit and (2) the information necessary to organize and prioritize the literature. Online access has eliminated the need for journals as distribution channels, so their primary current role is to provide authors with feedback prior to publication and a quick way for other researchers to prioritize the literature based on which journal publishes a paper. However, the feedback provided by reviewers is not focused on scientific merit but on whether to publish in a particular journal, which is generally of little use to authors and an opaque and noisy basis for prioritizing the literature. Further, each submission of a rejected manuscript requires the entire machinery of peer review to creak to life anew. This redundancy incurs delays, inconsistency, and increased burdens on authors, reviewers, and editors. Finally, reviewers have no real incentive to review well or quickly, as their performance is not tracked, let alone rewarded. One of the consistent suggestions for modifying the current peer review system is the introduction of some form of post-publication reception, and the development of a marketplace where the priority of a paper rises and falls based on its reception from the field (see other articles in this special topics). However, the information that accompanies a paper into the marketplace is as important as the marketplace’s mechanics. Beyond suggestions concerning the mechanisms of reception, we propose an update to the system of publishing in which publication is guaranteed, but pre-publication peer review still occurs, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their work following a mini pre-reception from the field. This step also provides a consistent set of rankings and reviews to the marketplace, allowing for early prioritization and stabilizing its early dynamics. We further propose to improve the general quality of reviewing by providing tangible rewards to those who do it well

Holding a Stick at Both Ends: On Faces and Expertise

Ever since Diamond and Carey\u27s (1986) seminal work, object expertise has often been viewed through the prism of face perception (for a thorough discussion, see Tanaka and Gauthier, 1997; Sheinberg and Tarr, 2010). According to Wong and Wong (2014, W&W), however, this emphasis has simply been a response to the question of modularity of face perception, and has not been about expertise in and of itself. It is precisely this conflation of questions of expertise and modularity, the consequent focus on FFA, and the detrimental effect this had on the field of object expertise research that we discussed as part of our original review (Harel et al., 2013)

The Human Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus Samples Visual Space Differently From Other Face-Selective Regions

Neuroimaging studies show that ventral face-selective regions, including the fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA), preferentially respond to faces presented in the contralateral visual field (VF). In the current study we measured the VF response of the face-selective posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). Across 3 functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, participants viewed face videos presented in different parts of the VF. Consistent with prior results, we observed a contralateral VF bias in bilateral FFA, right OFA (rOFA), and bilateral human motion-selective area MT+. Intriguingly, this contralateral VF bias was absent in the bilateral pSTS. We then delivered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over right pSTS (rpSTS) and rOFA, while participants matched facial expressions in both hemifields. TMS delivered over the rpSTS disrupted performance in both hemifields, but TMS delivered over the rOFA disrupted performance in the contralateral hemifield only. These converging results demonstrate that the contralateral bias for faces observed in ventral face-selective areas is absent in the pSTS. This difference in VF response is consistent with face processing models proposing 2 functionally distinct pathways. It further suggests that these models should account for differences in interhemispheric connections between the face-selective areas across these 2 pathways

Evaluating the correspondence between face-, scene-, and object-selectivity and retinotopic organization within lateral occipitotemporal cortex

The organization of human lateral occipitotemporal cortex (lOTC) has been characterized largely according to two distinct principles: retinotopy and category-selectivity. Whereas category-selective regions were originally thought to exist beyond retinotopic maps, recent evidence highlights overlap. Here, we combined detailed mapping of retinotopy, using population receptive fields (pRF), and category-selectivity to examine and contrast the retinotopic profiles of scene- (occipital place area, OPA), face- (occipital face area, OFA) and object- (lateral occipital cortex, LO) selective regions of lOTC. We observe striking differences in the relationship each region has to underlying retinotopy. Whereas OPA overlapped multiple retinotopic maps (including V3A, V3B, LO1, and LO2), and LO overlapped two maps (LO1 and LO2), OFA overlapped almost none. There appears no simple consistent relationship between category-selectivity and retinotopic maps, meaning category-selective regions are not constrained spatially to retinotopic map borders consistently. The multiple maps that overlap OPA suggests it is likely not appropriate to conceptualize it as a single scene-selective region, whereas the inconsistency in any systematic map overlapping OFA suggests it may constitute a more uniform area. Beyond their relationship to retinotopy, all three regions evidenced strongly retinotopic voxels, with pRFs exhibiting a significant bias towards the contralateral lower visual field, despite differences in pRF size, contributing to an emerging literature suggesting this bias is present across much of lOTC. Taken together, these results suggest that whereas category-selective regions are not constrained to consistently contain ordered retinotopic maps, they nonetheless likely inherit retinotopic characteristics of the maps from which they draw information

A Retinotopic Basis for the Division of High-Level Scene Processing between Lateral and Ventral Human Occipitotemporal Cortex

In humans, there is a repeated category-selective organization across the lateral and ventral surfaces of the occipitotemporal cortex. This apparent redundancy is often explained as a feedforward hierarchy, with processing within lateral areas preceding the processing within ventral areas. Here, we tested the alternative hypothesis that this structure better reflects distinct high-level representations of the upper (ventral surface) and lower (lateral surface) contralateral quadrants of the visual field, consistent with anatomical projections from early visual areas to these surfaces in monkey. Using complex natural scenes, we provide converging evidence from three independent functional imaging and behavioral studies. First, population receptive field mapping revealed strong biases for the contralateral upper and lower quadrant within the ventral and lateral scene-selective regions, respectively. Second, these same biases were observed in the position information available both in the magnitude and multivoxel response across these areas. Third, behavioral judgments of a scene property strongly represented within the ventral scene-selective area (open/closed), but not another equally salient property (manmade/natural), were more accurate in the upper than the lower field. Such differential representation of visual space poses a substantial challenge to the idea of a strictly hierarchical organization between lateral and ventral scene-selective regions. Moreover, such retinotopic biases seem to extend beyond these regions throughout both surfaces. Thus, the large-scale organization of high-level extrastriate cortex likely reflects the need for both specialized representations of particular categories and constraints from the structure of early vision. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT One of the most striking findings in fMRI has been the presence of matched category-selective regions on the lateral and ventral surfaces of human occipitotemporal cortex. Here, we focus on scene-selective regions and provide converging evidence for a retinotopic explanation of this organization. Specifically, we demonstrate that scene-selective regions exhibit strong biases for different portions of the visual field, with the lateral region representing the contralateral lower visual field and the ventral region the contralateral upper visual field. These biases are consistent with the retinotopy found in the early visual areas that lie directly antecedent to category-selective areas on both surfaces. Furthermore, these biases extend beyond scene-selective cortex and provide a retinotopic basis for the large-scale organization of occipitotemporal cortex

Beyond Perceptual Expertise: Revisiting the Neural Substrates of Expert Object Recognition

Real-world expertise provides a valuable opportunity to understand how experience shapes human behavior and neural function. In the visual domain, the study of expert object recognition, such as in car enthusiasts or bird watchers, has produced a large, growing, and often-controversial literature. Here, we synthesize this literature, focusing primarily on results from functional brain imaging, and propose an interactive framework that incorporates the impact of high-level factors, such as attention and conceptual knowledge, in supporting expertise. This framework contrasts with the perceptual view of object expertise that has concentrated largely on stimulus-driven processing in visual cortex. One prominent version of this perceptual account has almost exclusively focused on the relation of expertise to face processing and, in terms of the neural substrates, has centered on face-selective cortical regions such as the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). We discuss the limitations of this face-centric approach as well as the more general perceptual view, and highlight that expert related activity is: (i) found throughout visual cortex, not just FFA, with a strong relationship between neural response and behavioral expertise even in the earliest stages of visual processing, (ii) found outside visual cortex in areas such as parietal and prefrontal cortices, and (iii) modulated by the attentional engagement of the observer suggesting that it is neither automatic nor driven solely by stimulus properties. These findings strongly support a framework in which object expertise emerges from extensive interactions within and between the visual system and other cognitive systems, resulting in widespread, distributed patterns of expertise-related activity across the entire cortex