Untangling the Animacy Organization of Occipitotemporal Cortex

Some of the most impressive functional specializations in the human brain are found in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), where several areas exhibit selectivity for a small number of visual categories, such as faces and bodies, and spatially cluster based on stimulus animacy. Previous studies suggest this animacy organization reflects the representation of an intuitive taxonomic hierarchy, distinct from the presence of face- and body-selective areas in OTC. Using human functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the independent contribution of these two factors-the face-body division and taxonomic hierarchy-in accounting for the animacy organization of OTC and whether they might also be reflected in the architecture of several deep neural networks that have not been explicitly trained to differentiate taxonomic relations. We found that graded visual selectivity, based on animal resemblance to human faces and bodies, masquerades as an apparent animacy continuum, which suggests that taxonomy is not a separate factor underlying the organization of the ventral visual pathway.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Portions of the visual cortex are specialized to determine whether types of objects are animate in the sense of being capable of self-movement. Two factors have been proposed as accounting for this animacy organization: representations of faces and bodies and an intuitive taxonomic continuum of humans and animals. We performed an experiment to assess the independent contribution of both of these factors. We found that graded visual representations, based on animal resemblance to human faces and bodies, masquerade as an apparent animacy continuum, suggesting that taxonomy is not a separate factor underlying the organization of areas in the visual cortex.