Origins of food selectivity in human visual cortex

Several recent studies, enabled by advances in neuroimaging methods and large-scale datasets, have identified areas in human ventral visual cortex that respond more strongly to food images than to images of many other categories, adding to our knowledge about the broad network of regions that are responsive to food. This finding raises important questions about the evolutionary and developmental origins of a possible food-selective neural population, as well as larger questions about the origins of category-selective neural populations more generally. Here, we propose a framework for how visual properties of food (particularly color) and nonvisual signals associated with multimodal reward processing, social cognition, and physical interactions with food may, in combination, contribute to the emergence of food selectivity. We discuss recent research that sheds light on each of these factors, alongside a broader account of category selectivity that incorporates both visual feature statistics and behavioral relevance.