  Understanding how human brains interpret and process information is
important. Here, we investigated the selectivity and inter-individual
differences in human brain responses to images via functional MRI. In our first
experiment, we found that images predicted to achieve maximal activations using
a group level encoding model evoke higher responses than images predicted to
achieve average activations, and the activation gain is positively associated
with the encoding model accuracy. Furthermore, aTLfaces and FBA1 had higher
activation in response to maximal synthetic images compared to maximal natural
images. In our second experiment, we found that synthetic images derived using
a personalized encoding model elicited higher responses compared to synthetic
images from group-level or other subjects' encoding models. The finding of
aTLfaces favoring synthetic images than natural images was also replicated. Our
results indicate the possibility of using data-driven and generative approaches
to modulate macro-scale brain region responses and probe inter-individual
differences in and functional specialization of the human visual system.
