Existing research has demonstrated functional selectivity in the brain for high level categories of faces, places, bodies, and sensory and motor processes. Food, despite its abundance and importance, has not been considered as a category for which there is a visual selective region, perhaps because of its lack of visual coherence. In this paper, we investigate responsiveness to food in a large scale natural setting via several statistical methods performed on high-resolution fMRI response dataset to natural scenes. We identify two regions consistent across all participants in the high level visual cortex that appear to be functionally selective for food.

28 pages

Thesis Committee:
Leila Wehbe (Chair)
Michael J. Tarr

Srinivasan Seshan, Head, Computer Science Department
Martial Hebert, Dean, School of Computer Science

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