Angular gyrus responses show joint statistical dependence with brain regions selective for different categories

Category-selectivity is a fundamental principle of organization of perceptual brain regions. Human occipitotemporal cortex is subdivided into areas that respond preferentially to faces, bodies, artifacts, and scenes. However, observers need to combine information about objects from different categories to form a coherent understanding of the world. How is this multi-category information encoded in the brain? Studying the multivariate interactions between brain regions with fMRI and artificial neural networks, we found that the angular gyrus shows joint statistical dependence with multiple category-selective regions. Additional analyses revealed a cortical map of areas that encode information across different subsets of categories, indicating that multi-category information is not encoded in a single centralized location, but in multiple distinct brain regions.