Abstract
Human visual cortex contains many retinotopic and category-specific regions. These brain regions have been the focus of a large body of functional magnetic resonance imaging research, significantly expanding our understanding of visual processing. As studying these regions requires accurate localization of their cortical location, researchers perform functional localizer scans to identify these regions in each individual. However, it is not always possible to conduct these localizer scans. Here, we developed and validated a functional region of interest (ROI) atlas of early visual and category-selective regions in human ventral and lateral occipito-temporal cortex. Results show that for the majority of functionally defined ROIs, cortex-based alignment results in lower between-subject variability compared to nonlinear volumetric alignment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that 1) the atlas accurately predicts the location of an independent dataset of ventral temporal cortex ROIs and other atlases of place selectivity, motion selectivity, and retinotopy. Next, 2) we show that the majority of voxel within our atlas is responding mostly to the labeled category in a left-out subject cross-validation, demonstrating the utility of this atlas. The functional atlas is publicly available (download.brainvoyager.com/data/visfAtlas.zip) and can help identify the location of these regions in healthy subjects as well as populations (e.g., blind people, infants) in which functional localizers cannot be run.
Highlights
Human visual cortex extends from the occipital lobe to the posterior parietal and temporal lobes, containing more than two dozen visual areas
Using data from 19 healthy participants we aimed at generating a probabilistic atlas of occipito-temporal and ventral temporal cortex
Defined regions were normalized to group space using either (1) cortex-based alignment (CBA) or (2) nonlinear volumetric alignment 2 (NVA)
Summary
Human visual cortex extends from the occipital lobe to the posterior parietal and temporal lobes, containing more than two dozen visual areas. Higher visual areas are typically defined by their function and stimulus selectivity rather than the representation of the visual field. This includes preference to visual attributes such as motion (Sereno et al 1995), shape (Malach et al.1995; Grill-Spector et al 1998), or color (Lafer-Sousa et al 2016), as well as preference for certain visual stimuli over others. These regions are referred to as category-selective regions
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