Seeking cognitive and neural specificity in occipitotemporal cortex

Studies in our field have often operated under an implicit assumption that the purpose of visual processing is categorization. I argue that our reliance on univariate category-selectivity has diverted attention from behaviorally critical dimensions, such as individuation, which are best captured in multivariate patterns. Category-focused localizers suppress within-category variability, masking signals at the level of individuals, exemplars, and items. By shifting the emphasis from univariate activation to multivariate discriminability, we can better align neural measures with the cognitive demands of everyday vision.