Distributed subordinate specificity for bodies, faces, and buildings in human ventral visual cortex

Previous studies have revealed regions in human visual cortex with a strong preference for faces, headless bodies, and buildings. We investigated whether the pattern of activity in these category-selective regions is related to more subordinate distinctions among objects. Our experiments included two types of faces (elderly faces and baby faces), body parts (hands and torsos), and buildings (rural buildings and skyscrapers). Multi-voxel pattern analyses revealed very clear differences in the activation pattern between hands and torsos, and smaller but significant differences in the activation pattern between the two face conditions and between the two building conditions. The subordinate specificity was very distributed, as all category-selective regions were most selective for the distinction between hands and torsos, independently from their preferred category. The selectivity for hands versus torsos was preserved across exemplars and image orientations in all category-selective regions, indicating that the distributed subordinate selectivity is related to relatively invariant and higher-order properties of the images. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.