Is the human mind/brain composed of a set of highly specialized components, each carrying out a specific aspect of human cognition, or is it more of a general-purpose device, in which each component participates in a wide variety of cognitive processes?
The concept of functional specialization is not all or none but a matter of degree; a cortical region might be only slightly more engaged in one mental function than another, or it might be exclusively engaged in a single mental function.
The second ongoing controversy concerns the question of whether only basic sensory and motor functions are carried out in functionally specialized regions, or whether the same might be true even for higher-level cognitive functions.
Brain lesion studies are useful to understand the effect of losing one region of the brain.
FFA region is used to identify faces. This means our perception isn’t completely general. We understand certain objects better than others. The pixels we see are the same but there must a level above basic perception that is more specialized. What is the analogue for CV?
Is there a region for language. Maybe there isn’t and language emerged based on our present capabilities. The machinery for other types of processing can be repurposed into language.
Can people with a disorder in face perception recognize faces with conscious thought. Meaning rather than instant recognition they can specifically memorize details about a persons face. This would use a different region of the brain.
Face recognition is innate/genetic, but is fine-tuned by experience.
Some regions are so small that only modern imaging techniques can detect them.
Different regions respond maximally to different categories of input. But the regions respond to multiple categories. This is similar to a representation in a higher dimensional embedding space in that a category might the most active in one dimension, but other categories have non zero values in this direction.
Three models for the architecture of object recognition