Ben Deen¹, Chencheng Shen¹; ¹Tulane University

Object perception in primates is thought to be supported by a collection of brain areas within the ventral visual stream, with a hierarchical organization along a posterior-to-anterior axis. Decades of neuroimaging research has described the organization of category-sensitive visual areas within human posterior ventral temporal cortex. However, category-sensitive responses within with anterior temporal lobe (ATL) remain poorly understood due to signal dropout in fMRI data resulting from magnetic susceptibility artifacts. Here, we investigate the functional organization of visual responses in the ATL in healthy young adult data from the Human Connectome Project, leveraging a large sample size to overcome limits in data quality. We selected a subset of N = 864 participants based on quality control measures and a head motion cutoff (mean framewise displacement of .3mm). Cytoarchitectonic subregions of the ATL, including the temporal pole (TP) and perirhinal cortex (PR), were defined using a probabilistic atlas of hand-drawn regions from a separate set of human participants. Category-sensitive functional regions-of-interest were defined in individual participants by comparing responses to face, body, tool, and scene conditions, and response magnitudes and functional connectivity were assessed in independent data. We identify three distinct functional responses within the ATL: a socially-selective response within TP, a face-selective response within PR, and a non-face-object-selective response within PR. These three regions showed distinct patterns of functional connectivity with areas outside the ATL, each showing preferential connections parts of cortex with similar category preferences. These results demonstrate the presence of multiple distinct visual areas within the ATL, and show that the principle of category-sensitive organization extends to the top of the ventral visual processing hierarchy.