Perceiving other people is a seemingly effortless process. Yet within a few hundred milliseconds we are aware of who we are looking at, what this person is doing, and even what this person feels. We derive this information from the form and motion of the face and body. Faces may be particularly important for some aspects of person perception (e. g., identity recognition), whereas bodies may be more important for others (e. g., action recognition). Furthermore, information from the body is important in cases where it is not possible to perceive the details of the face, for instance when the face is occluded, or when we see someone from a distance. In most cases, however, it is likely that information from both the face and the body are perceived in parallel and are integrated at an early stage. Previous research on person perception has mostly focused on the brain mechanisms underlying face perception. Much less research has focused on the brain mechanismsu nderlying body perception,w hich is the topic of this thesis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) I provide evidence for a previously unknown body-selective visual area that overlaps a face-selective area. By employing novel analysis techniques that take into account patterns of activation across voxels I show that body- and face-selective areas can be functionally dissociated. Finally, I show that, in contrast to frontal and parietal action-recognition areas, visual body-selective areasd o not contain a dynamic representationo f observeda ctions. Together, thesef indings increaseo ur understandingo f the brain mechanismsu nderlying body, face and action perception, by showing both similarities and dissimilarities in the brain structures involved in these processes.