ArticleCurrent biology : CB2022
A highly selective response to food in human visual cortex revealed by hypothesis-free voxel decomposition.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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51 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Representational structure of perceived food attributes in human occipitotemporal cortex.iScience · 2026Article
- Dissociating the hierarchical processing of perceptual and food category information under different task demands.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Multidimensional Feature Tuning in Category Selective Areas of Human Visual Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Triple-N dataset: large-scale fMRI-guided dense recordings of nonhuman primate neural responses to natural scenes.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Integrating neuroscience across species and scales.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Higher visual areas act like domain-general filters with strong selectivity and functional specialization.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Category selectivity observed in the human brain is distinct from category selectivity observed in artificial neural networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The cortical canvas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Large-scale brain network interactions differentiate sweet, sour, and salty food cues during visual processing.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- The colors of images preferred by individual voxels can be used to delineate functionally distinct visually responsive brain areas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex.Cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Sequential experience reshapes population representations in visual cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Local lateral connectivity is sufficient for replicating cortex-like topographical organization in deep neural networks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Using scene proximity judgments to study food-specific recognition ability.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- A 7T fMRI dataset of synthetic images for out-of-distribution modeling of vision.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Teaching CORnet human fMRI representations for enhanced model-brain alignment.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2025Article
- Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The cerebellar components of the human language network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Prior work has identified cortical regions selectively responsive to specific categories of visual stimuli. However, this hypothesis-driven work cannot reveal how prominent these category selectivities are in the overall functional organization of the visual cortex, or what others might exist that scientists have not thought to look for. Furthermore, standard voxel-wise tests cannot detect distinct neural selectivities that coexist within voxels. To overcome these limitations, we used data-driven voxel decomposition methods to identify the main components underlying fMRI responses to thousands of complex photographic images. Our hypothesis-neutral analysis rediscovered components selective for faces, places, bodies, and words, validating our method and showing that these selectivities are dominant features of the ventral visual pathway. The analysis also revealed an unexpected component with a distinct anatomical distribution that responded highly selectively to images of food. Alternative accounts based on low- to mid-level visual features, such as color, shape, or texture, failed to account for the food selectivity of this component. High-throughput testing and control experiments with matched stimuli on a highly accurate computational model of this component confirm its selectivity for food. We registered our methods and hypotheses before replicating them on held-out participants and in a novel dataset. These findings demonstrate the power of data-driven methods and show that the dominant neural responses of the ventral visual pathway include not only selectivities for faces, scenes, bodies, and words but also the visually heterogeneous category of food, thus constraining accounts of when and why functional specialization arises in the cortex.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.