Object-selective responses in the human motion area MT/MST

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Abstract
The perception of moving objects and our successful interaction with them entail that the visual system integrates shape and motion information about objects. However, neuroimaging studies have implicated different human brain regions in the analysis of visual motion1,2 (medial temporal cortex; MT/MST) and shape3,4 (lateral occipital complex; LOC), consistent with traditional approaches in visual processing that attribute shape and motion processing to anatomically and functionally separable neural mechanisms. Here we demonstrate object-selective fMRI responses (higher responses for intact than for scrambled images of objects) in MT/MST, and especially in a ventral subregion of MT/MST, suggesting that human brain regions involved mainly in the processing of visual motion are also engaged in the analysis of object shape.