Questions such as how the human brain represents objects, faces and words, how this develops over the lifespan, and what happens when this process is disrupted by brain injury have remained a fundamental focus in cognitive neuroscience for decades. Interest in this question comes from neuropsychological investigations of patients with selective damage in the ventral stream, which suggested that damage to the occipito-temporal region in the right or left hemisphere results in a selective deficit for recognising faces and whole word reading, respectively. The advent of neuroimaging studies in healthy participants provided converging evidence from this early patient work and revealed a patchwork of regions along the length of the ventral visual stream which selectively responded to particular object categories.

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Despite these findings becoming “text-book knowledge” in cognitive neuroscience, the principles underlying such organisation, or indeed whether such organisation reflects category membership or other basic lower-level visual factors still remains an open question. This coupled with the development of new analysis techniques in neuroimaging (including multivariate pattern analysis), and movement away from single case studies, to large-scale case series analyses in patient populations means that this remains an exciting area of research. 

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This workshop will bring together researchers who are studying the organisation of the visual ventral stream from different methodological perspectives, not only to promote discussion between these established groups, but also to promote collaboration with a wider audience. We hope this interaction will benefit the development and promotion of the use of multiple, convergent research methodologies to answering this fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience.