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The degree to which visual processing within ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) is category specific remains a contentious issue. Striking category specific agnosias have been demonstrated in human patients with brain lesions, but whether these agnosias reflect the existence of domain specific knowledge systems or differences in the processing demands of different stimulus categories is undecided. Functional MRI (fMRI) and intracranial electrophysiological studies have provided alternate approaches for studying category specificity in the intact human brain. Here we present parallel studies of category specific processing conducted with fMRI in a sample of control subjects and with intracranial event-related potentials (ERPs) in a sample of patients undergoing clinical evaluation for epilepsy. Five different categories were tested: faces, tools, fruits/vegetables, non-word letterstrings, and vehicles. Stimuli appeared singly in pseudo-random order while subjects responded with a button press to the infrequent appearance of a circle target. Among all categories, vehicles evoked the most extensive fMRI activation which included the medial fusiform, lateral lingual, and parahippocampal gyri. Fruits/vegetables evoked separate activation in the insula, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. Faces evoked focal regions of activation in the lateral fusiform gyrus, and letterstrings activated a small region in the left lateral VOTC, which was consistent with the consistent activation by faces in the fusiform gyrus for the ERP studies. Focal ERPs were also evoked by letterstrings. Two el