bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/233387; this version posted December 13, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Characterizing the response to face pareidolia in human category-selective visual cortex Susan G Wardle*1, Kiley Seymour2 & Jessica Taubert3 1Department of Cognitive Science and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, 16 University Avenue, Macquarie University, New South Wales, 2109, Australia. 2School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 3Section on Neurocircuitry, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, The National Institute of Mental Health. 10 Center Drive, Bethesda, Maryland, 20892, USA. * Corresponding Author Dr Susan Wardle Department of Cognitive Science 16 University Avenue Macquarie University New South Wales, 2109, Australia. Ph: +61 2 9850 4072
[email protected] 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/233387; this version posted December 13, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Abstract The neural mechanisms underlying face and object recognition are understood to originate in ventral occipital-temporal cortex. A key feature of the functional architecture of the visual ventral pathway is its category-selectivity, yet it is unclear how category-selective regions process ambiguous visual input which violates category boundaries.