Abstract
Visual recognition of words and faces is associated with oppositely lateralized neural mechanisms in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC). We used fMRI multivariate pattern analysis to investigate the relationship between neural discriminability of word and face exemplars (i.e., within-category decoding) in VOTC and stimulus location. We also used univariate fMRI analyses and a behavioral task to demonstrate an expected opposite hemifield-hemisphere relationship and to further corroborate results from our multivariate fMRI analyses. As expected, observers who showed a right visual field (RVF) advantage for word recognition and a left visual field (LVF) advantage for face recognition also showed opposite cerebral lateralization for the two stimulus classes. For centrally-viewed stimuli, lateralized multivariate fMRI results were primarily limited to oppositely lateralized areas associated with word recognition and face recognition—a visual word form area (VWFA) in the left hemisphere and a fusiform face area (FFA) in the right hemisphere, respectively—and posterior fusiform (pFus) cortex on the same side for each. When words were viewed in the RVF, within-category decoding was limited to the VWFA (decoding in left pFus was no longer observed). When faces were viewed in the LVF, within-category decoding was limited to the FFA (decoding in right pFus was no longer observed). In contrast, when words and faces were viewed in the non-preferred location (i.e., LVF for words and RVF for faces), neither VWFA nor FFA in both hemispheres showed successful within-category decoding. However, bilateral pFus showed successful within-category decoding in both cases. Our results suggest that opposite visual field advantages for word and face recognition have a neural basis in VOTC. Compromised recognition performance in the visual field locations ipsilateral to known category selective areas (VWFA and FFA) may reflect a shift from category-specific visual processing to domain-general visual processing of object information in more posterior visual cortex.