The Cognitive Neuroanatomy of Human Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex

—-1 —0 —+1 and frustration. The fascination arises because variability in cortical structure and function may account for many aspects of our unique personalities and cognitive capabilities. For neuroimagers, the frustration arises because variability pre sents serious obstacles when attempting to assign par tic u lar functional activation patterns to specific cortical areas” (p. 1050). However, despite variability in brain structure, brain function, and perceptual abilities among individuals, recent evidence indicates that there are also stable features in brain structure across spatial scales and consistencies in the structuralfunctional coupling of cortical systems from one person to the next— especially within human ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC)— that are perceptually meaningful. As such, the two main goals of this chapter are to (1) provide a comprehensive review of this stability and the orderliness it produces within human VOTC and (2) explain how this orderliness is not epiphenomenal. Indeed, as this section of the book is dedicated to perception and cognition, VOTC is an ideal model system to show how an understanding among cortical microstructure, cortical macrostructure, and white matter connectivity informs computational models that leverage this anatomical knowledge to provide insights into the under pinnings of highlevel perception (e.g., word and face recognition). In line with these goals, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, we review studies demonstrating a strong anatomicalfunctional coupling between cortical folding and functional repre sen ta tions spanning largescale functional gradients and finescale functional regions within VOTC. In the second and third sections, we discuss two anatomical constraints that contribute to this structuralfunctional coupling: cytoarchitecture (e.g., the size, shape, and organ ization of cells across the layers of the cortical ribbon) and longrange white matter tracts connecting cortical regions. We then discuss how the consistent structuralfunctional organization of human VOTC motivates a new class of abstract Variability in human brain structure and function contributes to variability in perception and cognition. Nevertheless, in addition to the structuralfunctional variability of human ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC), recent research reveals an unpre ce dented correspondence among cortical folding, functional repre sen ta tions, cytoarchitectonic areas, and white matter tracts in VOTC. This organ ization is remarkably stable across individuals and has been causally linked to domainspecific aspects of perception. In this chapter we provide a comprehensive review of this growing body of work. We use VOTC as a model system because it (1) plays an integral role in highlevel visual perception and (2) displays an elegant correspondence between structure and function across spatial scales— from cells to networks. Specifically, we highlight that the correspondence between the anatomical and functional organ ization of VOTC can be used to (1) motivate and test computational models, (2) understand how neural responses in VOTC change during dif fer ent cognitive tasks, and (3) relate to the perception of specific stimulus categories. Together, the findings reviewed in the pre sent chapter lay the foundation for a new subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience, which we refer to as cognitive neuroanatomy (CNA). We formally define CNA and end this chapter by proposing future applications of CNA.