Visuo-haptic object-related activation in the ventral visual pathway

The ventral pathway is involved in primate visual object recognition. In humans, a central stage in this pathway is an occipito–temporal region termed the lateral occipital complex (LOC), which is preferentially activated by visual objects compared to scrambled images or textures. However, objects have characteristic attributes (such as three-dimensional shape) that can be perceived both visually and haptically. Therefore, object-related brain areas may hold a representation of objects in both modalities. Using fMRI to map object-related brain regions, we found robust and consistent somatosensory activation in the occipito–temporal cortex. This region showed clear preference for objects compared to textures in both modalities. Most somatosensory object-selective voxels overlapped a part of the visual object-related region LOC. Thus, we suggest that neuronal populations in the occipito–temporal cortex may constitute a multimodal object-related network.

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