Object recognition relies on different transformations of the retinal input, ranging from local contrast to object shape and category. While some of those transformations are thought to occur at specific stages of the visual hierarchy, the features they represent are correlated (e.g., object shape and identity) and the selectivity for the same feature can be found across many brain regions. This overlap may be explained either by collinearity across representations, or may instead reflect the coding of multiple dimensions by the same cortical population. Moreover, orthogonal and shared components may differently impact on distinctive stages of the visual hierarchy. We recorded functional MRI (fMRI) activity while participants passively attended to object images and employed a statistical approach that partitioned orthogonal and shared object representations to reveal their relative impact on brain processing. Orthogonal shape representations (silhouette, curvature and medial-axis) independently explained distinct and overlapping clusters of selectivity in occitotemporal (OTC) and parietal cortex. Moreover, we show that the relevance of shared representations linearly increases moving from posterior to anterior regions. These results indicate that the visual cortex encodes shared relations between different features in a topographic fashion and that object shape is encoded along different dimensions, each representing orthogonal features.### Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.

Shape coding in occipito-temporal cortex relies on object silhouette, curvature and medial-axis