The ventral visual stream is conceived as a pathway for object recognition. However, we also recognize the actions an object can be involved in. Here, we show that action recognition critically depends on a pathway in lateral occipitotemporal cortex, partially overlapping and topographically aligned with object representations that are precursors for action recognition. By contrast, object features that are more relevant for object recognition, such as color and texture, are typically found in ventral occipitotemporal cortex. We argue that occipitotemporal cortex contains similarly organized lateral and ventral ‘what’ pathways for action and object recognition, respectively. This account explains a number of observed phenomena, such as the duplication of object domains and the specific representational profiles in lateral and ventral cortex.

腹侧视觉流被认为是物体识别的途径。然而，我们也认识到对象可能参与的动作。在这里，我们表明动作识别严重依赖于枕颞外侧皮质中的通路，该通路与作为动作识别前体的对象表示部分重叠并在拓扑上对齐。相比之下，与对象识别更相关的对象特征，例如颜色和纹理，通常在腹侧枕颞叶皮层中发现。我们认为，枕颞叶皮层分别包含类似组织的侧向和腹侧“什么”通路，用于动作和物体识别。该帐户解释了许多观察到的现象，例如对象域的重复以及外侧和腹侧皮层中的特定表征轮廓。