How might occipitotemporal body-selective regions interact with other brain areas to support person perception?

Abstract

We argued in our Discussion Paper for the view that the main functional role of occipitotemporal body-selective regions is to make explicit, via patterns of activity, the shape and posture of perceived bodies, rather than directly representing higher-order person attributes. Much of the commentary was on the question of how activity in other brain areas interacts with activity in EBA and FBA. In this reply, we emphasize that our claims do not imply that EBA and FBA are cognitively impenetrable modules that are driven only by bottom-up input from earlier visual regions. Instead, it is likely that these regions interact heavily with other brain regions, and that their activity is shaped––in limited ways––by both feed-forward and feedback connections. In the context of such large-scale networks, EBA and FBA activity will be most effective at conveying detailed information about the shape and posture of bodies in the current percept.