title: The Cytoarchitecture of Domain-specific Regions in Human High-level Visual Cortex.
abstract: A fundamental hypothesis in neuroscience proposes that underlying cellular architecture (cytoarchitecture) contributes to the functionality of a brain area. However, this hypothesis has not been tested in human ventral temporal cortex (VTC) that contains domain-specific regions causally involved in perception. To fill this gap in knowledge, we used cortex-based alignment to register functional regions from living participants to cytoarchitectonic areas in ex vivo brains. This novel approach reveals 3 findings. First, there is a consistent relationship between domain-specific regions and cytoarchitectonic areas: each functional region is largely restricted to 1 cytoarchitectonic area. Second, extracting cytoarchitectonic profiles from face- and place-selective regions after back-projecting each region to 20-μm thick histological sections indicates that cytoarchitectonic properties distinguish these regions from each other. Third, some cytoarchitectonic areas contain more than 1 domain-specific region. For example, face-, body-, and character-selective regions are located within the same cytoarchitectonic area. We summarize these findings with a parsimonious hypothesis incorporating how cellular properties may contribute to functional specialization in human VTC. Specifically, we link computational principles to correlated axes of functional and cytoarchitectonic segregation in human VTC, in which parallel processing across domains occurs along a lateral-medial axis while transformations of information within domain occur along an anterior-posterior axis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Kevin S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Weiner
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Barnett
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich, 52428 Jülich, Germany.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lorenz
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich, 52428 Jülich, Germany.|Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Medical Faculty, University of Düsseldorf, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors.forename: Julian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Caspers
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Anthony
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stigliani
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich, 52428 Jülich, Germany.|Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute for Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.|JARA-BRAIN, Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance, 52428 Jülich, Germany.
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Amunts
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich, 52428 Jülich, Germany.|JARA-BRAIN, Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance, 52428 Jülich, Germany.|Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, RWTH Aachen University, 52062 Aachen, Germany.
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zilles
authors.affiliation: Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.|Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT EECS/HST, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fischl
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.|Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Kalanit
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Grill-Spector
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: brain map; cytoarchitecture; fusiform body area (FBA); fusiform face area (FFA); parahippocampal place area (PPA); visual word form area (VWFA)