Faces and bodies are processed in separate but adjacent regions in the primate visual cortex. Yet, the functional significance of dividing the whole person into areas dedicated to its face and body components and their neighboring locations remains unknown. Here we hypothesized that this separation and proximity together with a normalization mechanism generate clutter-tolerant representations of the face, body, and whole person when presented in complex multi-category scenes. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a fMRI study, presenting images of a person within a multi-category scene to human male and female participants and assessed the contribution of each component to the response to the scene. Our results revealed a clutter-tolerant representation of the whole person in areas selective for both faces and bodies, typically located at the border between the two category-selective regions. Regions exclusively selective for faces or bodies demonstrated clutter-tolerant representations of their preferred category, corroborating earlier findings. Thus, the adjacent locations of face- and body-selective areas enable a hardwired machinery for decluttering of the whole person, without the need for a dedicated population of person-selective neurons. This distinct yet proximal functional organization of category-selective brain regions enhances the representation of the socially significant whole person, along with its face and body components, within multi-category scenes.

面部和身体在灵长类动物视觉皮层中独立但相邻的区域进行处理。然而，将整个人划分为专门用于其面部和身体部位及其邻近位置的区域的功能意义仍然未知。在这里，我们假设，当在复杂的多类别场景中呈现时，这种分离和接近以及归一化机制可以生成面部、身体和整个人的杂乱容错表示。为了检验这一假设，我们进行了一项功能磁共振成像研究，向人类男性和女性参与者展示多类别场景中的人的图像，并评估每个组件对场景响应的贡献。我们的结果揭示了在面部和身体选择性区域中整个人的杂乱容忍表示，通常位于两个类别选择区域之间的边界。专门针对面部或身体进行选择的区域表现出对它们喜欢的类别的杂乱容忍表示，证实了早期的发现。因此，面部和身体选择性区域的相邻位置启用了用于整理整个人的硬连线机制，而不需要专门的人选择性神经元群。这种类别选择性大脑区域的独特但邻近的功能组织增强了在多类别场景中具有社会意义的整个人及其面部和身体组成部分的表征。