Category Trumps Shape as an Organizational Principle of Object Space in the Human Occipitotemporal Cortex

The organizational principles of the object space represented in the human ventral visual cortex are debated.

Here we contrast two prominent proposals that, in addition to an organization in terms of animacy, propose either a representation related to aspect ratio (stubby-spiky) or to the distinction between faces and bodies.

We designed a critical test that dissociates the latter two categories from aspect ratio and investigated responses from human fMRI (of either sex) and deep neural networks (BigBiGAN).

Representational similarity and decoding analyses showed that the object space in the occipitotemporal cortex and BigBiGAN was partially explained by animacy but not by aspect ratio.

Data-driven approaches showed clusters for face and body stimuli and animate-inanimate separation in the representational space of occipitotemporal cortex and BigBiGAN, but no arrangement related to aspect ratio.

In sum, the findings go in favor of a model in terms of an animacy representation combined with strong selectivity for faces and bodies.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We contrasted animacy, aspect ratio, and face-body as principal dimensions characterizing object space in the occipitotemporal cortex.

This is difficult to test, as typically faces and bodies differ in aspect ratio (faces are mostly stubby and bodies are mostly spiky).

To dissociate the face-body distinction from the difference in aspect ratio, we created a new stimulus set in which faces and bodies have a similar and very wide distribution of values along the shape dimension of the aspect ratio.

Brain imaging (fMRI) with this new stimulus set showed that, in addition to animacy, the object space is mainly organized by the face-body distinction and selectivity for aspect ratio is minor (despite its wide distribution).