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Visuo-haptic object-related activation in the ventral visual pathway

Nature Neuroscience volume 4, pages 324–330 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

The 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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Figure 1: Somatosensory clusters in the occipito–temporal region showing multimodal (visuo-haptic) object selectivity.
Figure 2: The magnitude of activation reveals multimodal (visuo-haptic) object selectivity in the occipito–temporal region.
Figure 3: Cortical maps and time course of regions showing preferential somatosensory, visual and multimodal (visuo-haptic) object activation in one subject (QE).
Figure 4: Voxels showing multimodal (visuo-haptic) object selectivity and averaged time course across subjects.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Harel for the cortex reconstruction, E. Okon for technical assistance and design, and I. Levy for software development. We thank S. Hochstein, G. Avidan-Carmel and U. Hason for their comments. This study was funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF) grant number I-576-040.01/98 and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities grant 8009/00-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Neurobiology Department, Life Science Institute and Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University, Givat Ram, 91904, Jerusalem, Israel

    Amir Amedi & Ehud Zohary

  2. Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Rafael Malach

  3. Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel

    Talma Hendler & Sharon Peled

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  1. Amir Amedi
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Correspondence to Ehud Zohary.

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Amedi, A., Malach, R., Hendler, T. et al. Visuo-haptic object-related activation in the ventral visual pathway. Nat Neurosci 4, 324–330 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/85201

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