Situated in the temporal lobe on its internal convexity (curved or rounded outward), and in humans consists of the middle and inferior temporal gyri. In terms of cytoarchitecture, it corresponds to Brodman’s areas 20 and 21. It is the final stage of the ventral cortical visual stream, and as such only responds to visual stimuli. It tends to have large receptive fields, thus permitting stimulus generalization, with the responses of the neurons often being invariant with regard to the position of the visual field as well as object view and size. A relatively small percentage of the neurons are selective for facial images. The ITC has a cardinal role in both the short- and long-term memory for visual patterns. When lesioned, it gives rise to (visual) agnosia, and much less frequently to prosopagnosia. The functional development of the ITC appears to be protracted postnatally, seeming not to be complete until late in the first year (at least in monkeys). Consequently, the development of pattern recognition within the ITC probably depends on visual experience and on the maturation of other interconnected brain structures (e.g., hippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex).
See Agnosia, Cortical lobes, Dorsal visual pathway (or stream), Frontal eye fields (FEF), Gyrus, Infantile amnesia, Inferior parietal lobe (IPL), Orbitofrontal cortex, Prosopagnosia, Two visual systems hypothesis, Ventral visual pathway (or stream)
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