Optical flow analysis dissociates cortical selectivity for body movements and shapes

Abstract Perceiving the movements of other living organisms is a fundamental ability across species. Although several cortical regions are selective for static body features, it is unclear whether these areas also encode motion cues independently of body shapes. Here, we isolated optical flow patterns from naturalistic body movements using synthesized videos that eliminate explicit body shape information. Behavioral results suggest that participants successfully recognized walking directions from the shape-free flow motion stimuli. Using ultra-high field fMRI, we found that three body-motion-related areas, fusiform gyrus (FG), lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC), and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), were sensitive to both the amount and the spatiotemporal structure of flow motion. Critically, the flow motion effects were significantly correlated to voxel-wise body motion selectivity in FG and LOTC, but not to body shape selectivity in any of the ROIs. These findings identify flow motion as a distinct and behaviorally sufficient cue for body perception, which could dissociate the neural mechanism underlying motion and shape encoding in FG and LOTC.