Davide Cortinovis¹ (), Giulia Orlandi¹, Lotte Van Campenhout^1,2, Stefania Bracci¹; ¹University of Trento, Italy, ²KU Leuven, Belgium

The occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) has traditionally been viewed as functionally organized into category-selective areas, such as those responding to faces, body parts, and scenes. More recent studies using the Natural Scenes Dataset identified food-selective areas adjacent to face-selective areas (in both lateral and medial OTC), independent of basic visual features like shape, texture or color. However, other evidence found overlapping activations between food and tool responses, suggesting that food-selectivity could be better understood through a dimensional framework that emphasizes shared properties like manipulability. Our study explored the dimensions underlying food-selective areas in the OTC using fMRI and a stimulus set including images of faces, bodies, hands, food, tools, manipulable objects, scenes, and spiky meaningless objects. For food and object categories, both grayscale and colored images in different configurations were presented to assess the roles of visual (e.g., color, clutter-complexity) and action-related (e.g., graspability, effector-specificity) properties. Our localizer identified two distinct food-selective clusters in OTC: one medial, localized between regions selective for faces and scenes, and one lateral, partially overlapping with regions selective for tools and manipulable objects. In lateral OTC, no significant overlap was found between hand and food selectivity. However, we replicated the previously known hand-tool overlap, indicating that tools and hands share effector-specific information absent for food. Moreover, visual properties like object clutter and, to a lesser extent, color contributed to the representations in the medial (but not lateral) food cluster. Finally, computational models of visual cortex topography only partially captured the observed organization of food-selective areas, with similar representation of visual properties but no organization based on action information. Overall, our results show that food responses in OTC may be better understood in the light of a dimensional framework that considers both the visual and the action-related properties of food, going beyond a category-centric framework.