The processes of acting on and recognizing objects have traditionally been attributed to dorsal and ventral visual pathways, respectively. Although extensive evidence suggests that the two pathways interact, the extent and the strength of these interactions across whole-brain networks remain unclear. In two experiments, we characterized the whole-brain network connections of object-selective regions in each pathway using functional magnetic resonance imaging data acquired while participants viewed objects.
Here, we show substantial spatial overlap in connectivity networks generated from the dorsal and the ventral seed region—with greater similarity between object networks within an individual than each network shows across individuals. This overlap persists across viewing of tools and non-tools and even after controlling for the shared variance between pathways. Together, these findings reveal that dorsal and ventral pathways form highly overlapping and distributed networks in the service of object perception.
This research was supported by grants from the National Eye Institute, NIH (R01 EY027018 and EY026701) to M.B., as well as T32GM142630, T32GM008208 and T32GM081760 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to C.S. Also, M.B. acknowledges support from P30 CORE award EY08098, and EY026701 from the National Eye Institute, NIH, and unrestricted supporting funds from The Research to Prevent Blindness Inc, NY, and the Eye & Ear Foundation of Pittsburgh. V.A. acknowledges support from the University of Pennsylvania Data Driven Discovery Initiative (DDDI) and MindCore Fellowship.
The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NIGMS or NEI. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Department of Ophthalmology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Correspondence to Claire Simmons or Vladislav Ayzenberg. The authors declare no competing interests.
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