Active vision is linked to category selectivity in the individual brain

Individuals reliably differ in how they look at complex visual scenes, with the most prominent variation in their propensity to fixate faces and text. In 61 adults, we tested the hypothesis that these differences in gaze are linked to representational properties of the individual visual system. Eye-tracking captured each observer’s characteristic gaze tendencies during naturalistic scene viewing, and independent functional magnetic resonance imaging recorded category-selective responses to faces, words, and other stimuli when participants were instructed to fixate centrally. We find that the propensity to fixate faces or text goes along with enhanced distinctiveness and enlarged functional regions of corresponding categorical representations in the ventral stream. These in turn predicted performance on reading and face recognition tasks. Thus, active vision appears linked to the precision of category-selective encoding and corresponding neural resources in the individual brain.