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Science 28 September 2001:
Vol. 293. no. 5539, pp. 2425 - 2430
DOI: 10.1126/science.1063736
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Research Articles

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

James V. Haxby,1* M. Ida Gobbini,12 Maura L. Furey,12 Alumit Ishai,1 Jennifer L. Schouten,1 Pietro Pietrini3

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.

1 Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
2 Department of Human and Environmental Sciences and
3 Laboratory of Clinical Biochemistry, Department of Experimental Pathology, University of Pisa, I-56126 Pisa, Italy.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: haxby{at}nih.gov

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