Joint neuronal tuning for object form and position in the human lateral occipital complex

A long-standing heuristic in visual neuroscience holds that extrastriate visual cortex is parceled into a dorsal "where" pathway concerned with stimulus position and motion and a ventral "what" pathway concerned with stimulus form. Several recent studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), however, have shown that small changes in the position of a single object can produce reliable changes in activity patterns in object-selective lateral occipital complex (LOC). Although these data demonstrate that information about both object form and position is present at the region level in LOC, the extent to which they reflect joint neuronal tuning to these dimensions is unclear. To measure joint tuning for form and position, we used fMRI to record patterns of activity evoked in LOC and other visual areas while subjects viewed pairs of objects that varied in category content, overall position, and relative object position. Consistent with previous results, multivoxel activity patterns in LOC varied reliably with the category content and position of object pairs. Moreover, activity patterns in the lateral occipital (LO) subregion of LOC varied significantly with the relative positions of objects within pairs, even when absolute pair position was constant. This result provides strong evidence for the existence of neuronal populations in LO which are jointly tuned for both object form (i.e., category) and position.