From regions to networks: reframing the role of the extrastriate body area

In the current issue of Cerebral Cortex, Smekal et al. (2026) argue that the extrastriate body area (EBA) is not only involved in the visual perception of the human body, but that it is a multisensory and multifunctional region that supports the processing of body-related information "across sensory, conceptual and linguistic domains". In this commentary, I argue that a better understanding of the role of the EBA profits from a network perspective that takes different subdivisions of the EBA into account.