Fig. 3.

FMRI data. (A) Conventional fMRI techniques revealed no difference between the middle-aged HIV-positive women and age-matched controls, with compatible mean fMRI responses to face, house, and scrambled face from the two functional localizer scans. In contrast, both fMRI-RA (B) or H_corr (C) revealed a reduced neural specificity in the FFA of HIV-positive women than that of HIV-negative controls. (B) Three conditions of interests, M3/6/9, were included in the fMRI-RA experiment. In contrast to a full recovery from adaptation at M6 condition in controls (similar to what we have found in healthy younger adults (Jiang et al., 2006)), there was no recover from adaptation (even at M9 condition) in HIV-positive individuals, suggesting a significant decrease in neural specificity (reflecting as a broadened neuronal tuning) in the FFA of HIV+ women. (C) Local voxel-wise correlations also revealed a lower H_corr value in the FFA of HIV-positive individuals than HIV-negative controls, confirming a reduced neural specificity in FFA, even in the absence of behavioral deficits. Error bars show within-subject SEM.