Visuo-haptic object-related activation in the ventral visual pathway

The ventral pathway is involved in primate visual object recognition. In hu mans, a central stage in this pathway is an occipito-temporal region termed the lateral occipital complex (LOC), which is preferentially activated by visual objects compared to scrambled images or textures. However, objects h ave characteristic attributes (such as three-dimensional shape) that can be perceived both visually and haptically. Therefore, object-related brain ar eas may hold a representation of objects in both modalities. Using fMRI to map object-related brain regions, we found robust and consistent somatosens ory activation in the occipito-temporal cortex. This region showed clear pr eference for objects compared to textures in both modalities. Most somatose nsory object-selective voxels overlapped a part of the visual object-relate d region LOG. Thus, we suggest that neuronal populations in the occipito-te mporal cortex may constitute a multimodal object-related network.