Accurate perception of objects’ spatial extent, the space they occupy, is crucial to interact with the objects. The topographic representation of space in the early visual cortex (EVC, V1/2/3) has been favored as a neural correlate of spatial extent perception, but its exact role remains unclear. This study aimed to clarify the functional role of human EVC in spatial representation, by examining two distinct anisotropies in EVC and perception, the ‘co-axial(aligned with texture orientation)’ and the ‘radial(directions outward from the fovea into the periphery)’ anisotropies. Using fMRI and visual psychophysics experiments, we found that the EVC’s representation is radially biased, while perceived shape is co-axially biased. Despite these opposing patterns, individual variations in the anisotropy were shared between EVC and perception. In summary, these findings have important implications for understanding the functional role of EVC in spatial extent representation. Firstly, spatial extent perception builds on EVC’s spatial representation but requires an additional mechanism to transform its topographical bias. Secondly, the correspondence in predominate radial bias between EVC and retinal image statistics implies that EVC’s computational role is to represent retinal images with high fidelity, rather than world images, forwarding these representations to downstream regions for the recovery of world object properties with the knowledge of the retinal image generation process.