Functional and epiphenomenal modulation of neural activity in body-selective visual areas.

Abstract Although attention may play a major role in explaining EBA/FBA activation during high-order, body-related tasks, it is important to establish the functional significance of top-down modulation in different tasks. While neuroimaging studies documented the functional and anatomical specificity of EBA/FBA activation during body form perception, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and brain-lesion studies provided causative evidence that activity in EBA is essential for processing morphological details of body parts. Local processing of body shapes in EBA might contribute to the representation of high-order body attributes, including person identity and body esthetics, which probably rely on a widespread network of different interconnected areas.