Distributed and Overlapping Representations of Faces and Objects in Ventral Temporal Cortex

TLDR

The study used fMRI to record pattern responses in ventral temporal cortex while participants viewed faces, cats, five categories of man‑made objects, and nonsense images. Distinct response patterns for each category were found, and even when maximal‑response regions were excluded, category identity could still be decoded, demonstrating that face and object representations in ventral temporal cortex are widely distributed and overlapping.

Abstract

The functional architecture of the object vision pathway in the human brain was investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure patterns of response in ventral temporal cortex while subjects viewed faces, cats, five categories of man-made objects, and nonsense pictures. A distinct pattern of response was found for each stimulus category. The distinctiveness of the response to a given category was not due simply to the regions that responded maximally to that category, because the category being viewed also could be identified on the basis of the pattern of response when those regions were excluded from the analysis. Patterns of response that discriminated among all categories were found even within cortical regions that responded maximally to only one category. These results indicate that the representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex are widely distributed and overlapping.