• Raúl Hernández-Pérez, Laura V Cuaya, Eduardo Rojas-Hortelano, Azalea Reyes-Aguilar, Luis Concha, and Victor de Lafuente.
• Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Querétaro, QRO. 76230, Mexico. Electronic address: raul@lafuentelab.org.
• Neuroscience. 2017 Jun 3; 352: 226-235.

AbstractThe visual system classifies objects into categories, and distinct populations of neurons within the temporal lobe respond preferentially to objects of a given perceptual category. We can also classify the objects we recognize with the sense of touch, but less is known about the neuronal correlates underlying this cognitive function. To address this question, we performed a multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) activity to identify the cortical areas that can be used to decode the category of objects explored with the hand. We observed that tactile object category can be decoded from the activity patterns of somatosensory and parietal areas. Importantly, we found that categories can also be decoded from the lateral occipital complex (LOC), which is a multimodal region known to be related to the representation of object shape. Furthermore, a hyperalignment analysis showed that activity patterns are similar across subjects. Our results thus indicate that tactile object recognition generates category-specific patterns of activity in a multisensory area known to encode objects, and that these patterns have a similar functional organization across individuals.Copyright © 2017 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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