Distributed Cortical Regions for the Recall of People, Places, and Objects

The human medial parietal cortex (MPC) is recruited during multiple cognitive processes. Previously, we demonstrated regions specific to recall of people or places and proposed that the functional organization of MPC mirrors the category selectivity defining the medial-lateral axis of the ventral-temporal cortex (VTC). However, prior work considered recall of people and places only, and VTC also shows object selectivity sandwiched between face- and scene-selective regions. Here, we tested a strong prediction of our proposal: like VTC, MPC should show a region specifically recruited during object recall, and its relative cortical position should mirror the one of VTC. While responses during people and place recall showed a striking replication of prior findings, we did not observe any evidence for object-recall effects within MPC, which differentiates it from the spatial organization in VTC. Importantly, beyond MPC, robust recall effects were observed for people, places, and objects on the lateral surface of the brain. Place-recall effects were present in the angular gyrus, frontal eye fields, and peripheral portions of the early visual cortex, whereas people recall selectively drove response in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus. Object-recall effects were largely restricted to a region posterior to the left somatosensory cortex, in the vicinity of the supramarginal gyrus. Taken together, these data demonstrate that while there are distributed regions active during recall of people, places, and objects, the functional organization of MPC does not mirror the medial-lateral axis of VTC but reflects only the most salient features of that axis-namely, representations of people and places.