Ventral temporal electrocorticography of face perception (face and house images) under control and noisy conditions.

This is a set of MATLAB datafiles and complete analysis code ('fhnoisy.zip') to reproduce the complete findings of the manuscript "Face percept formation in human ventral temporal cortex". For a complete description of the data, please open the file titled 'README_fhnoisy_dataset_notes.pdf' contained in the zip file. Please note that the data for patients "HA", "AP", and "WC" is being held out until June 2016 due to ongoing data competitions (http://aka.ms/decodesignals). The abstract for this manuscript is:
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Loci in ventral temporal cortex are selectively active while viewing faces and other objects, but it remains unclear whether these areas represent accumulation of simple visual information, or processing of intact percept. We measured broadband electrocorticographic changes from implanted electrodes on the ventral temporal brain surface while showing patients noise-degraded images of faces and houses. In a subset of posterior fusiform gyrus face-selective regions, cortical activity decreased proportionally to noise increase, until the perceptual threshold. Beyond threshold, and for house stimuli, activity remained at baseline. Such convergence of proportional and thresholded response identifies active loci of face percept formation. These loci exist within a topological sequence of face percept formation in the human ventral visual stream, preceded by activity in peri-calcarine early visual areas, and followed by activity in post-perceptual sub-regions of the ventral temporal lobe. This topological sequence sets forth a physiological basis for the anatomy of face perception, explaining different perceptual deficits following temporal lobe injury.
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Please keep in mind that these anonymized data are from real patients who donated time in a difficult period of their lives to advance our understanding of the brain. Any publication involving these data MUST include the following in the methods section of the manuscript, without modification:

"Ethics statement: All patients participated in a purely voluntary manner, after providing informed written consent, under experimental protocols approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Washington (#12193). All patient data was anonymized according to IRB protocol, in accordance with HIPAA mandate. These data originally appeared in the manuscript “Face percept formation in human ventral temporal cortex“ published in [Journal – currently in submission] in 2016 [Insert Embedded Citation for the Manuscript Here – e.g. Endnote, BibTex]."