Generating Stimuli for Simultaneously Mapping Retinotopic and Category-Selective Brain Regions.

COEX 

Mapping of retinotopic and category-selective regions in individual human brains using fMRI has become a routine task across multiple labs. As retinotopic and category-selective regions are selective to different properties of visual stimuli, two distinct experiments are conducted to map these brain regions. For example, traveling-wave stimuli with bars (Dumoulin and Wandell, 2008; Benson et al., 2018; Finzi et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2023) or with wedges and rings (Engel et al., 1997; Benson et al., 2018) are typically used to map population receptive fields (pRFs, Dumoulin and Wandell, 2008), identify visual field maps, and delineate borders of retinotopic visual regions (V1, V2, V3, hV4, VO, LO, TO, V3ab, and IPS). Whereas, functional localizer experiments (Kanwisher et al., 1997; Stigliani et al., 2015) using various categorical images of faces, bodies, scenes, and objects are used to define category-selective regions (mFus-faces, pFus-faces, mOTS-words, pOTS-words, OTS-bodies, CoS-places). Here, we developed a method that generates optimal stimuli for simultaneously mapping retinotopic and category-selective regions in a single fMRI experiment.