From body selectivity to socio-emotional meaning: where extrastriate body area stops.

The role of the extrastriate body area (EBA) in emotion perception remains unresolved. Building on Smekal et al. (Smekal V, Beckers L, Poyo Solanas M, de Gelder B. 2026. From localization to distribution: Revisiting the functional organization of the Extrastriate Body Area. Cereb Cortex: this issue) and our recent fMRI study (Yargholi E, Mertens L, Van Hove LI, Gunay EM, Vennekens J, Van den Stock J, Op de Beeck H. 2025. Alignment of human behavior, brain, and AI models in the high-level valence processing of complex social scenes. bioRxiv: 2025.2005.2008.651182), we argue that this partly reflects a failure to dissociate body-related visual features from emotional meaning. In complex social scenes with incongruent contextual and person-based valence, EBA responses were dominated by body-related visual properties and showed no robust decoding of emotional valence. By contrast, valence information emerged in distributed association regions. These findings suggest that the EBA primarily encodes perceptual body evidence, whereas socio-emotional meaning arises through broader network integration.