Summary The ventral stream refers to a neural pathway that projects from early visual areas through to anterior temporal cortex, and comprises regions in ventral and lateral occipital-temporal cortex. The ventral stream is critical for recognizing visually presented objects. Functional imaging studies of the human brain have shown that different regions within the ventral stream show differential activation to nonliving (tools, houses) and living stimuli (animals, faces). The causes of these category preferences are widely debated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that the same regions of the ventral stream that show category preferences for nonliving stimuli and animals in sighted adults, show the same category preferences in adults who are blind since birth. Both blind and sighted participants had larger blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) responses in the medial fusiform gyrus for nonliving stimuli compared to animal stimuli, and differential BOLD responses in lateral occipital cortex for animal stimuli compared to nonliving stimuli. These findings demonstrate that the medial-to-lateral bias by conceptual domain in the ventral stream does not require visual experience in order to develop, and suggest the operation of innately determined domain-specific constraints on the organization of object knowledge.

In order to recognize the identity of a face we need to distinguish very similar images (specificity) while also generalizing identity information across image transformations such as changes in orientation (tolerance). Recent studies investigated the representation of individual faces in the brain, but it remains unclear whether the human brain regions that were found encode representations of individual images (specificity) or face identity (specificity plus tolerance). In the present article, we use multivoxel pattern analysis in the human ventral stream to investigate the representation of face identity across rotations in depth, a kind of transformation in which no point in the face image remains unchanged. The results reveal representations of face identity that are tolerant to rotations in depth in occipitotemporal cortex and in anterior temporal cortex, even when the similarity between mirror symmetrical views cannot be used to achieve tolerance. Converging evidence from different analysis techniques shows that the right anterior temporal lobe encodes a comparable amount of identity information to occipitotemporal regions, but this information is encoded over a smaller extent of cortex.

According to embodied cognition theories, higher cognitive abilities depend on the reenactment of sensory and motor representations. In the first part of this review, we critically analyze the central claims of embodied theories and argue that the existing behavioral and neuroimaging data do not allow investigators to discriminate between embodied cognition and classical cognitive accounts, which assume that conceptual representations are amodal and symbolic. In the second part, we review the main claims and the core electrophysiological findings typically cited in support of the mirror neuron theory of action understanding, one of the most influential examples of embodied cognition theories. In the final part, we analyze the claim that mirror neurons subserve action understanding by mapping visual representations of observed actions on motor representations, trying to clarify in what sense the representations carried by these neurons can be claimed motor.