Abstract
Ventral visual cortex can be divided into a variety of retinotopically as well as category-specific regions. These brain areas have been the focus of a large body of functional MRI research, significantly expanding our understanding of high-level visual processing. As studying these regions requires accurate localization of their cortical location, it is usually necessary to perform functional localizer runs on an individual subject level. These runs are costly in terms of scanning time and a participant’s capacity level. Moreover, certain patient populations are unable to undergo such localizers, for instance the congenitally blind. In the current paper, we aimed to overcome these challenges by developing a functional atlas based on localizer- and visual field mapping data acquired in 20 healthy subjects. Single subject functional maps were aligned to both volume and surface group space, after which a probabilistic functional group atlas was created. We subsequently quantified the inter-subject variability of category-selective regions in visual cortex and the specificity of each atlas region – to our knowledge the first such analyses. Additionally, we validated our atlas against existing atlases of retinotopic as well as category-specific regions. The resulting functional atlas is made publicly available for a variety of software packages (https://share.brainvoyager.com/index.php/s/m2E9oZTGWwXodRk).