Distinct and distributed functional connectivity patterns across cortex reflect the domain-specific constraints of object, face, scene, body, and tool category-selective modules in the ventral visual pathway R. Matthew Hutchison a, ⁎, Jody C. Culham b,c , Stefan Everling a,b , J. Randall Flanagan d,e , Jason P. Gallivan d,e, ⁎⁎ a Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada b Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada c Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada d Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada e Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada abstract article info Article history: Accepted 20 March 2014 Available online 31 March 2014 Keywords: fMRI Functional connectivity Faces Scenes Bodies Tools Primate occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) is composed of a mosaic of highly specialized brain regions each involved in the high-level visual analysis and recognition of particular stimulus categories (e.g., objects, faces, scenes, bod- ies and tools). Whereas theories attempting to account for this modular organization of category-selective re- sponses in OTC have largely focused on visually driven, bottom-up inputs to OTC (e.g., dimensions related to the visual structure of the world and how it is experienced), other proposals have instead focused on the connec- tivity of OTC's outputs, emphasizing how the information processed by different OTC regions might be used by the rest of the brain. The latter proposals underscore the importance of interpreting the activity (and selectivity) of individual OTC areas within the greater context of the widely distributed network of areas in which they are embedded and that use OTC information to support behavior. Here, using resting-state fMRI, we investigated the functional connectivity (FC) patterns of OTC regions associated with object-, face-, scene-, body- and tool- related processing defined from task-based localizers acquired in the same cohort of participants. We observed notable differences in the whole-brain FC patterns, not only across OTC regions, but even between areas thought to form part of the same category-selective network. Furthermore, we found that the neuroanatomical location of OTC regions (e.g., adjacency) had little, if any, bearing on the FC networks observed. FC between certain OTC areas and other regions traditionally implicated in sensory-, motor-, affective- and/or cognitive-related processing and the associated theoretical implications is discussed. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Convergent evidence from a wide variety of methodologies, ranging from non-human primate (NHP) neurophysiology to human functional MRI (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and neuropsy- chology, suggests that occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) contains a constel- lation of highly specialized brain regions involved in the high-level perceptual analysis of different categories of visual stimuli (see Grill- Spector and Malach, 2004). For instance, human fMRI work has identi- fied a number of regions – some of which have also been reported in the NHP (see for example, Nasr et al., 2011; Tsao et al., 2003, 2006; Wachsmuth et al., 1994) – that maximally respond to the viewing of particular object categories. These areas include the lateral occipital (LO) area and posterior fusiform sulcus (pFs) for basic objects (Malach et al., 1995), the occipital face area (OFA) and fusiform face area (FFA) for faces (Kanwisher et al., 1997), the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and parahippocampal area (PPA) for scenes (Epstein and Kanwisher, 1998; Maguire et al., 1998), the extrastriate body area (EBA) and fusiform body area (FBA) for bodies (Downing et al., 2001; Peelen and Downing, 2005a) and the posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) for tools (reviewed in Lewis, 2006). Consistent with this fMRI evidence, disruption to the normal activity of these regions, either via brain lesions or stimula- tion, selectively impairs the perceptual processing of specific object cate- gories (e.g., Mahon et al., 2007; Moro et al., 2008; Parvizi et al., 2012; Pitcher et al., 2009, 2012; Urgesi et al., 2004). Several theories have been proposed to account for this highly mod- ular arrangement of category-selective neural responses in OTC, with the majority suggesting that this organization largely reflects the visual NeuroImage 96 (2014) 216–236 ⁎ Correspondence to: R.M. Hutchison, Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. ⁎⁎ Correspondence to: J.P. Gallivan, Department of Psychology, Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada. E-mail addresses: rhutchison@FAS.Harvard.edu (R.M. Hutchison), jasongallivan@gmail.com (J.P. Gallivan). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.03.068 1053-8119/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect NeuroImage journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ynimg