A Probabilistic Functional Atlas of Human Occipito-Temporal Visual Cortex

24th November 2020

The visual cortices of the human brain contain various category-selective regions. These brain regions have been the focus of a large body of fMRI research, significantly expanding our understanding of visual processing. As studying these regions requires accurate localization of their cortical location, researchers perform functional localizer scans to identify these regions in each individual. However, conducting these localizer scans is time consuming, and often not possible in certain populations, such as the blind. In a collaboration with Maastricht University and Stanford University, we developed and validated a functional region of interest (ROI) atlas of early visual and category-selective regions in human ventral and lateral occipito-temporal cortex. The atlas accurately predicts the location of an independent dataset of ventral temporal cortex ROIs and other atlases of place selectivity, motion selectivity, and retinotopy. Moreover, the majority of voxels within this atlas is responding mostly to the labeled category in a left-out subject cross-validation, demonstrating the utility of this atlas. The atlas is publicly available here; download.brainvoyager.com/data/visfAtlas.zip .