The perception of a meaningful facial pattern on a nebulous stimulus—face pareidolia—is a typical human experience. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies have generally shown similarities in the spatio-temporal responses to typical faces and objects eliciting face pareidolia, that is, facelike objects. However, the extent to which facelike objects engage the same neural basis as human faces remains unclear. To address this issue, we used direct measures of brain activity from intracerebral electrodes implanted in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) of a large group of patients (n = 44). Face selectivity was determined by contrasting a large set of naturalistic face or facelike object images with non-face object categories. High signal-to-noise ratio face-selective and facelike object-selective responses were objectively identified and quantified with frequency tagging and compared in space and time throughout the VOTC. Selective activity to facelike objects was found in all key regions of the human cortical face network, extending to the previously unexplored anterior temporal lobe (ATL). Although category-selective activity was markedly reduced for facelike objects compared with human faces, consistent with previous findings, 89% of facelike object-selective contacts spatially overlapped with human face-selective contacts, while the remaining spatially scattered contacts recorded negligible responses. Furthermore, the amplitude of the two face-selective neural signals showed high correlations across regions, recording contacts and time courses as well as concurrent early onset, challenging the view that facelike objects are interpreted as faces through feedback from higher order brain regions. Together, our findings demonstrate that the pareidolic perception of face in facelike objects engages the same ventro-temporal neural circuitry, with the same temporal dynamics, as human faces.

Recent reviews emphasized the need for investigating the complexity of multiple subareas of word selectivity and how this relates to selectivity for other visual categories, at the individual level at a high spatial resolution (without normalization or smoothing). To investigate this, both on the brain surface and in the representational space of the occipitotemporal cortex, we presented 19 participants with images of 20 different categories during 7T fMRI. These categories included several word-like conditions, and in addition cover many of the dimensions that have been suggested to define object space, such as animacy and real-world size. In the left hemisphere, we found three subareas of the visual word form area (VWFA) and one extra subarea around the pFus face-selective area. We also observed several areas of selectivity to hands that could consistently guide the localization of word and face areas. No clear predictive anatomical landmarks were found. Results of the right hemisphere were less clear, in part due to weaker word selectivity. In the representational space, word selectivity stood out from other categories. It had multiple neighboring categories at a similar distance (e.g., faces, bodies, hands, cars), so no special relationship was found with, for example, faces. These results enable a consistent and reliable way to locate subareas of word selectivity and may inspire future research into words in the representational space of the occipitotemporal cortex.