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Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision
Functional specialization within high-level vision is reflected in the topographic organization of the ventral temporal cortex (VTC). The presence and consistent locations of small areas responding selectively to particular visual categories – such as faces and scenes – has led to proposals of innate domain-specific modules. However, such proposals do not easily explain other aspects of an apparently multi-scale topographic organization of high-level visual features in VTC. Computational models have recently accounted for the presence of domain-selective areas and other facets of topographic organization from a basic optimization process with local topographic pressures, such as locally constrained connectivity, but fail to account for the consistent location of category-selectivity. In the current work, we extend a recent computational model to demonstrate how this consistency may emerge from wiring constraints external to VTC, focusing on the role of retinotopically organized early v