TY  - JOUR
VL  - 101
ID  - eprints3374
EP  - 5663
A1  - Pietrini, Pietro
A1  - Furey, Maura L.
A1  - Ricciardi, Emiliano
A1  - Gobbini, Maria Ida
A1  - Wu, W.-H. Carolyn
A1  - Cohen, Leonardo
A1  - Guazzelli, Mario
A1  - Haxby, James V.
SN  - 1091-6490
N2  - We investigated whether the topographically organized, category-related patterns of neural response in the ventral visual pathway are a representation of sensory images or a more abstract representation of object form that is not dependent on sensory modality. We used functional MRI to measure patterns of response evoked during visual and tactile recognition of faces and manmade objects in sighted subjects and during tactile recognition in blind subjects. Results showed that visual and tactile recognition evoked category-related patterns of response in a ventral extrastriate visual area in the inferior temporal gyrus that were correlated across modality for manmade objects. Blind subjects also demonstrated category-related patterns of response in this ?visual? area, and in more ventral cortical regions in the fusiform gyrus, indicating that these patterns are not due to visual imagery and, furthermore, that visual experience is not necessary for category-related representations to develop in these cortices. These results demonstrate that the representation of objects in the ventral visual pathway is not simply a representation of visual images but, rather, is a representation of more abstract features of object form.
SP  - 5658
AV  - none
TI  - Beyond sensory images: Object-based representation in the human ventral pathway
Y1  - 2004///
KW  - haptic perception; fMRI; supramodal cortex
UR  - http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0400707101
IS  - 15
JF  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
ER  -