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

Although attention may play a major role in explaining the 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, rTMS and brain-lesion studies provided causative evidence that activity in EBA/FBA is essential for processing morphological details of body parts. Local processing of body shapes in EBA/FBA might contribute to the representation of high-orders body attributes, including person identity and body aesthetics, which likely rely on a widespread network of different interconnected areas.