The FFA was discovered and continues to be investigated in humans using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies.

Studies have recently shown that the FFA is composed of functional clusters that are at a finer spatial scale than prior investigations have measured.

The expertise hypothesis, as championed by Isabel Gauthier and others, offers an explanation for how the FFA becomes selective for faces in most people.

The authors suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon.

A patient known as C. K., who suffered brain damage as a result of a car accident, later developed object agnosia.

He experienced great difficulty with basic-level object recognition, also extending to body parts, but performed very well at recognizing faces.

[14] A later study showed that C. K. was unable to recognize faces that were inverted or otherwise distorted, even in cases where they could easily be identified by normal subjects.

[16] Another study found that there is stronger activity in the FFA when a person sees a familiar face as opposed to an unfamiliar one.

[22] Studies of late patients of autism have discovered that autistic people have lower neuron densities in the FFA.

Case studies into other dedicated areas of the brain may suggest that the FFA is intrinsically designed to recognize faces.

Studies involving language characters have also been conducted in order to ascertain the role of the FFA in face recognition.

This calls into question the evolutionary purpose of the FFA, as children show the ability to differentiate faces.

[31] During this time, babies may exhibit the ability to differentiate between genders, with some evidence suggesting that they prefer faces of the same sex as their primary caregiver.

[32] It is theorized that, in terms of evolution, babies focus on women for food, although the preference could simply reflect a bias for the caregivers they experience.

Infant vision involves only light and dark recognition, recognizing only major features of the face, activating the amygdala.