The extrastriate body area (also) subserves visual body detection

The extrastriate body area (EBA) has been implicated in many body-related tasks, from emotional body perception to embodied cognition, raising the question of whether the EBA is a visual body-selective area. Here, I review evidence that the EBA is visually tuned to body shape, even in the near-absence of attention, and is causally involved in visual body detection. The EBA's bottom-up tuning to body shape can account for the prioritized visual awareness and detection of bodies observed in behavioral studies. The EBA may have evolved to ensure the rapid visual detection of conspecifics, a crucial first stage in social cognition already present in infants.