Semantic Organization of Body Part Representations in the Occipitotemporal Cortex

Abstract

First paragraph: Experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have revealed that the ventral and lateral occipitotemporal cortices (VOTC and LOTC, respectively), areas often associated with high-level visual processing (Grill-Spector and Malach, 2004), show preferential activation during the observation of body parts. Early results examining preferential brain activation during observation of body parts highlighted the importance of a region in the LOTC. This was termed the extrastriate body area (EBA) by Downing et al. (2001), who found that this region responded more strongly to images of body parts than to various control stimuli. Supporting these results, Urgesi et al. (2004) applied transcranial magnetic stimulation over EBA, which resulted in a reduced ability to discriminate between body parts. More recently, Bracci et al. (2010) found an area of the LOTC that responded preferentially to the observation of hands, suggesting that body part representation in the OTC is likely to be heterogeneous.