Nature Neuroscience
4, 324 - 330 (2001)
doi:10.1038/85201
Visuo-haptic object-related activation in the ventral visual pathwayAmir Amedi1, Rafael Malach2, Talma Hendler3, Sharon Peled3
& Ehud Zohary11
Neurobiology Department, Life Science Institute and Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University, Givat Ram, Jerusalem 91904, Israel
2
Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
3
Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel
Correspondence should be addressed to Ehud Zohary udiz@lobster.ls.huji.ac.ilThe ventral pathway is involved in primate visual object recognition. In humans, a central stage in this pathway is an occipito−temporal region termed the lateral occipital complex (LOC), which is preferentially activated by visual objects compared to scrambled images or textures. However, objects have characteristic attributes (such as three-dimensional shape) that can be perceived both visually and haptically. Therefore, object-related brain areas may hold a representation of objects in both modalities. Using fMRI to map object-related brain regions, we found robust and consistent somatosensory activation in the occipito−temporal cortex. This region showed clear preference for objects compared to textures in both modalities. Most somatosensory object-selective voxels overlapped a part of the visual object-related region LOC. Thus, we suggest that neuronal populations in the occipito−temporal cortex may constitute a multimodal object-related network.
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