When moving faces activate the house area: an fMRI study of object-file retrieval.

Background: The visual cortex of the human brain contains specialized modules for processing different visual features of an object. Confronted with multiple objects, the system needs to attribute the correct features to each object (often referred to as 'the binding problem'). The brain is assumed to integrate the features of perceived objects into object files - pointers to the neural representations of these features, which outlive the event they represent in order to maintain stable percepts of objects over time.

Integrating faces, houses, motion, and action: spontaneous binding across ventral and dorsal processing streams.

Perceiving an event requires the integration of its features across numerous brain maps and modules. Visual object perception is thought to be mediated by a ventral processing stream running from occipital to inferotemporal cortex, whereas most spatial processing and action control is attributed to the dorsal stream connecting occipital, parietal, and frontal cortex. Here we show that integration operates not only on ventral features and objects, such as faces and houses, but also across ventral and dorsal pathways, binding faces and houses to motion and manual action.