SFN2010 Note #2

326.6 Golomb & Kanwisher measured BOLD activation to images varied either in category or in position. They then used multivoxel classification technique to analyze classification performance in a bunch of ROIs. They showed that not only the early and dorsal visual areas coded position more than category and the ventral area coded categories, but also all the position coding are retinotopic, not spatiotopic.

325.9-11 Doumolin group is really working hard to sell their pRF (population receptive field) story. I can image how uscan eful it is if one map the RF of each individual voxel. With that, we can really talk about lateral interaction in many brain areas and to investigate the different response properties of these areas with one experiment.
However, in a couple hours later, LI & Freeman (483.8) showed the metabolic coupling of center and surround. That is, pRF may be influenced by surrounds by metabolic factors. Hence, it's accuracy is remain questionable.

Petro et al. (393.15) tried to measure the diagnostic features for expression discrimination with fMRI. They showed a face for expression discrimination task, then, use a checkerboard to identify the retinotopic areas corresponding to eyes and mouths. They showed that the mouth and the eye areas in V1 does not tell expression well, but the rest of V1 does.
This study itself is not well executed but the idea is nice. We may borrow this idea to do some good things.