Spikiness and animacy as potential organising principles of human ventral visual cortex

Considerable research has been devoted to understanding the fundamental organising principles of the ventral visual pathway. A recent study revealed a series of 3–4 topographical maps arranged along the macaque inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The maps articulated a two-dimensional space based on the spikiness and animacy of visual objects, with ‘inanimate-spiky’ and 'inanimate-stubby’ regions of the maps constituting two previously unidentified cortical networks. The goal of our study was to determine whether a similar functional organisation might exist in human IT. To address this question, we presented the same object stimuli and images from ‘classic’ object categories (bodies, faces, houses) to humans while recording fMRI activity at 7 Tesla. Contrasts designed to reveal the spikiness-animacy object space evoked extensive significant activation across human IT. However, unlike the macaque, we did not observe a clear sequence of complete maps, and selectivity for the spikiness-animacy sp..., This dataset contains anatomical and functional MRI data from 10 human subjects. All neuroimaging data are included in their raw form. Additionally, anatomical data have been preprocessed and parcellated using FreeSurfer (Dale et al. 1999; Fischl et al. 1999), specifically, using the recon-all function. Region of interest masks were created from the Harvard Oxford Cortical Structural Atlas or taken from a probabilistic retinotopic atlas (Wang et al., 2015) and are in standard MNI152 2mm space. , Directory structure has been compressed into a single .zip file and can be unpacked using the native compression software included in most operating systems.