The bilateral Inferior Temporal Gyrus, temporooccipital part, as defined in the Harvard-Oxford cortical atlas, comprises the posterior segment of the inferior temporal gyrus extending into the temporo-occipital junction, typically located on the ventral and lateral surfaces of the temporal and occipital lobes. This region is associated with high-level visual processing, including aspects of object recognition, complex form analysis, and integration of visual information with stored representations, and lies adjacent to areas implicated in processing faces and other category-specific stimuli within the ventral visual stream. Cytoarchitectonically, it corresponds broadly to portions of the inferior temporal cortex bordering occipital visual association areas, receiving input from earlier visual regions and projecting to multimodal and limbic structures involved in memory and semantic processing. There is no direct Wikipedia article for this exact subregion; a closely related area is the Inferior temporal gyrus.
The bilateral inferior temporal gyrus, temporooccipital part, has been implicated in genetic studies primarily through its role in high-level visual processing, semantic memory, and language-related functions. Imaging genetics and GWAS of cortical structure have shown that variation in cortical thickness, surface area, and volume in inferior temporal regions is influenced by common variants in genes involved in neurodevelopment and synaptic function (e.g., HMGA2, MEF2C, and loci near KIAA0586 and DACT1 in large ENIGMA and UK Biobank cohorts), and these structural measures are moderately heritable. GWAS of general cognitive ability, educational attainment, and reading-related traits have reported overlapping loci whose effects are partly mediated through temporal and temporooccipital cortices, which contribute to semantic and visual word-form processing. In psychiatric genetics, polygenic risk for schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder shows distributed effects on temporal lobe morphology, including inferior temporal regions, with some studies linking risk variants in synaptic and glutamatergic genes (such as GRM3 and CACNA1C) to altered temporal cortical structure or activation. In neurodevelopmental disorders, autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia GWAS and candidate gene studies (e.g., involving CNTNAP2, DCDC2, KIAA0319) have reported associations with functional and structural abnormalities in temporooccipital temporal areas supporting language and reading. Although no single “inferior temporal gyrus gene” has been identified, converging evidence from large-scale GWAS of brain imaging, cognition, and psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders indicates that genetic influences on this region are polygenic and shared across multiple traits, particularly those involving visual recognition, language, and higher cognitive function.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 16
Hemisphere: bilateral
Atlas: HarvardOxford cort maxprob thr25 1mm
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Wali Sidiqyar*, Gaurav Rudravaram*, Elyssa M. McMaster, Trent M. Schwartz, Adam M. Saunders, Kurt G. Schilling, Bennett A. Landman "Introducing SPINS: A Shared Public Visualization Library of Neuroanatomical Structures." Medical Imaging with Deep Learning- short paper
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