Enhanced Category Tuning Revealed by Intracranial Electroencephalograms in High-Order Human Visual Areas

• Published in: The Journal of neuroscience Vol. 27; no. 23; pp. 6234 - 6242
• Main Authors: Privman, Eran, Nir, Yuval, Kramer, Uri, Kipervasser, Svetlana, Andelman, Fani, Neufeld, Miri Y, Mukamel, Roy, Yeshurun, Yehezkel, Fried, Itzhak, Malach, Rafael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Soc Neuroscience 06.06.2007; Society for Neuroscience
• Subjects: Electrodes, Implanted; Electroencephalography - instrumentation; Electroencephalography - methods; Evoked Potentials, Visual - physiology; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Pattern Recognition, Visual - classification; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Photic Stimulation - methods; Visual Cortex - physiology
• ISSN: 0270-6474; 1529-2401; 1529-2401
• DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4627-06.2007

The functional organization of human sensory cortex was studied by comparing intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings of local field potentials in neurosurgical patients with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) obtained in healthy subjects. Using naturalistic movie stimuli, we found a tight correlation between these two measures throughout the human sensory cortex. Importantly, the correlation between the iEEG and fMRI signals was site-specific, exhibiting neuroanatomically specific coupling. In several cortical sites the iEEG activity was confined strictly to one object category. This site selectivity was not limited to faces but included other object categories such as houses and tools. The selectivity of the iEEG signals to images of different object categories was remarkably higher when compared with the selectivity of the corresponding fMRI signals. A plausible interpretation of the fMRI and iEEG results concerns cortical organization in which object categories are organized in a mosaic of narrowly tuned object-selective clusters.