Human visual cortex contains regions selectively involved in perceiving and recognizing ecologically important visual stimuli such as people and places. Located in the ventral temporal lobe, these regions are organized consistently relative to cortical folding, a phenomenon thought to be inherited from how centrally or peripherally these stimuli are viewed with the retina. While this eccentricity theory of visual cortex has been one of the best descriptions of its functional organization, whether or not it accurately describes visual processing in all category-selective regions is not yet clear. Through a combination of behavioral and functional MRI measurements in 27 participants (17 females), we demonstrate that a limb-selective region neighboring well-studied face-selective regions shows tuning for the visual periphery in a cortical region originally thought to be centrally biased. We demonstrate that the spatial computations performed by the limb-selective region are consistent with visual experience and in doing so, make the novel observation that there may in fact be two eccentricity gradients, forming an eccentricity reversal across high-level visual cortex. These data expand the current theory of cortical organization to provide a unifying principle that explains the broad functional features of many visual regions, showing that viewing experience interacts with innate wiring principles to drive the location of cortical specialization.

中文翻译：

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跨高级视觉皮层的偏心率梯度反转。


人类视觉皮层包含选择性参与感知和识别生态上重要的视觉刺激的区域，例如人和地点。这些区域位于腹侧颞叶，相对于皮质折叠的组织一致，皮质折叠是一种现象，这种现象被认为是从视网膜观察这些刺激的中心或外围方式遗传而来的。虽然这种视觉皮层的偏心率理论一直是对其功能组织的最佳描述之一，但它是否准确描述了所有类别选择区域的视觉处理尚不清楚。通过对 27 名参与者（17 名女性）进行行为和功能 MRI 测量的结合，我们证明与经过充分研究的面部选择性区域相邻的肢体选择性区域显示出对最初被认为集中偏倚的皮质区域中视觉边缘的调整。我们证明了肢体选择性区域执行的空间计算与视觉体验一致，在此过程中，我们做出了新颖的观察，即实际上可能存在两个偏心率梯度，在高级视觉皮层中形成偏心率反转。这些数据扩展了当前的皮层组织理论，提供了一个统一的原则，解释了许多视觉区域的广泛功能特征，表明观看体验与先天布线原则相互作用，以驱动皮层特化的位置。