Functional Organization of the Ventral Temporal Cortex

Abstract

Many complex aspects of human visual perception and recognition take place in the ventral temporal cortex; however, the functional organization of this region remains unknown. Much of the brain has been found to consist of discrete cortical areas which are distinguishable by various aspects of cortical organization, including functional properties. In the ventral temporal cortex, only a handful of visual category-selective areas have been found which collectively constitute a minority of the region. This thesis addresses two issues regarding the ventral temporal cortex. The first is an investigation of the development of known category-selective regions through a review of neural plasticity and an empirical study of a subject with a unique developmental history. The second is an approach to functionally parcellating the ventral temporal cortex, which surveys other approaches to parcellating the ventral temporal cortex and then introduces a novel data-driven method for identifying cortical functional organization.