Visual recognition of shapes and textures: an fMRi study

Previous literature suggest that processing of visually presented shapes and textures starts in the early visual areas, but subsequently follow different pathways. The purpose of this experiment was to further investigate differential activation for shapes and textures in order elucidate the pathways involved in visual shape and texture matching. In the present study, brain areas involved in discrimination of shapes and textures are mapped, using the same set of stimuli for shape and texture decisions. Texture matching activates more prefrontal regions than shape matching, particularly regions in the left middle frontal gyrus and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Shape specific activation includes an occipital/temporal region which is associated with multimodal object matching. The pattern of results suggests that recognition of textures may be based upon different ordering conditions in memory, which involve a prefrontal network and require a great deal more workload than the holistic representation of shape.