Leveraging ventral temporal cortex's primary role in object recognition

Decades of work demonstrate that the ventral temporal cortex (VTC) comprises category selective regions. Ritchie et al. urge a shift in perspective: new research should be grounded in behavioral relevance, not category selectivity. Here, we outline how leveraging, not shifting away from category selectivity, expands our understanding of brain function, complex cognition, and development. Further, while we agree that naturalistic paradigms will accelerate progress in this field, given category selectivity is central to VTC's information processing, we suggest future work to examine information transfer from VTC initial object recognition computation to other cortices for facilitating complex human behavior.