Facial identification exclusively produced increased bilateral activation in the fusiform gyrus, highlighting the dissociation between faces and other object processing.
Studies of patients with brain damage have revealed pure agnosic disorders that selectively impair recognition of specific object categories.
Such agnosic disorders have been reported for faces (prosopagnosia), living vs. nonliving stimuli, fruits, vegetables, tools, and musical instruments among others, suggesting that such categories may be processed independently within the brain.
Thus it appears that tools and animals, at least, are not wholly processed by discrete brain areas (despite selective impairment) and alternative theories propose that rather that being object-specific, cortical regions may show preferential activation as a result of greater expertise in one category, greater homogeneity between category members, task-related biases, and attentional preference amongst others.
Malach et al. (2002) report that points on the retina sharing foveal centricity are mapped onto parallel cortical bands and it therefore follows that object classes that are processed differently by retinal cells should be represented distinctly within the brain.