Domain-specific connectivity drives the organization of object knowledge in the brain.

The goal of this chapter is to review neuropsychological and functional MRI findings that inform a theory of the causes of functional specialization for semantic categories within occipito-temporal cortex-the ventral visual processing pathway. The occipito-temporal pathway supports visual object processing and recognition. The theoretical framework that drives this review considers visual object recognition through the lens of how "downstream" systems interact with the outputs of visual recognition processes. Those downstream processes include conceptual interpretation, grasping and object use, navigating and orienting in an environment, physical reasoning about the world, and inferring future actions and the inner mental states of agents. The core argument of this chapter is that innately constrained connectivity between occipito-temporal areas and other regions of the brain is the basis for the emergence of neural specificity for a limited number of semantic domains in the brain.