Cortical representations of bodies and faces are strongest in their commonly experienced configurations

Faces and bodies are perhaps the most salient and evolutionarily important visual stimuli and here we show with human functional imaging that the strength of their representations depends on long-term experience. Representations were strongest for stimuli in their typical combinations of visual field and side (e.g. left-field, right-body), though all conditions were simply reflections and translations of one another. Thus, high-level representations reflect the statistics with which stimuli occur.