Contralateral bias is a well-known feature of early visual cortex, but how it varies across higher-level, category-selective visual cortex and how much that bias differs between preferred and nonpreferred is unclear. Here, we examined 12 category-selective regions across 4 experiments using peripherally presented faces, bodies, houses, and scenes, to measure the difference in contralateral bias between preferred and nonpreferred stimuli. The results showed a substantial range of contralateral biases across the category-selective regions, similar to prior studies using category-selective stimuli [Silson, E. H., Groen, I. I., & Baker, C. I. Direct comparison of contralateral bias and face/scene selectivity in human occipitotemporal cortex. Brain Structure and Function , 227 , 1405–1421, 2022; Gomez, J., Natu, V., Jeska, B., Barnett, M., & Grill-Spector, K. Development differentially sculpts receptive fields across early and high-level human visual cortex. Nature Communications , 9 , 788, 2018; Silson, E. H., Groen, I. I. A., Kravitz, D. J., & Baker, C. I. Evaluating the correspondence between face-, scene-, and object-selectivity and retinotopic organization within lateral occipitotemporal cortex. Journal of Vision , 16 , 14, 2016; Kay, K. N., Weiner, K. S., & Grill-Spector, K. Attention reduces spatial uncertainty in human ventral temporal cortex. Current Biology , 25 , 595–600, 2015; Silson, E. H., Chan, A. W.-Y., Reynolds, R. C., Kravitz, D. J., & Baker, C. I. A retinotopic basis for the division of high-level scene processing between lateral and ventral human occipitotemporal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience , 35 , 11921–11935, 2015]. These contralateral biases were stronger in the left hemisphere regions than right, an asymmetry that was unchanged even when participants performed an attentionally demanding task. Thus, corresponding pairs of category-selective regions (e.g., left fusiform face area [lFFA] and right FFA [rFFA]) do not appear to be mirror images of each other; instead, the right hemisphere regions engage in greater integration of information from the two hemifields. The rFFA and right fusiform body area—both located on the right lateral fusiform gyrus—consistently had the weakest contralateral biases. That this asymmetry was most pronounced in the fusiform gyrus may account for why a unilateral lesion to the rFFA but not the lFFA can produce prosopagnosia. Together, our findings demonstrate that category-selective areas show pronounced differences in the extent of their contralateral biases and that a consistent asymmetry in the strength of the contralateral biases exists between the two hemispheres.

Human extrastriate cortex contains functional regions that are selective for particular categories such as faces, bodies, and places, but it is unclear whether these category-selective regions are necessary for normal perception of their preferred stimuli. One of these regions is the right fusiform body area (FBA), which is selectively involved in body perception. Do loss of the right fusiform gyrus and the absence of the right FBA necessarily lead to deficits in body perception? Here we report the performance of Galen, a brain-damaged patient who lost the right fusiform gyrus and has no right FBA, on eight tasks of body perception. Despite his lesion, Galen showed normal performance on all tasks. Galen's results demonstrate that damage to the right fusiform gyrus and the lack of the right FBA do not necessarily lead to persisting deficits in body perception.