Faculty Opinions recommendation of Neural representations of faces and limbs neighbor in human high-level visual cortex: evidence for a new organization principle.

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winrich Freiwald
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
High Level

scholarly journals Recognition Alters the Spatial Pattern of fMRI Activation in Early Retinotopic Cortex

2010 ◽  
Vol 103 (3) ◽  
pp. 1501-1507 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.-J. Hsieh ◽  
E. Vul ◽  
N. Kanwisher
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Object Identity ◽  
Stimulus Information ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Level Information ◽  
High Level ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Pattern

Early retinotopic cortex has traditionally been viewed as containing a veridical representation of the low-level properties of the image, not imbued by high-level interpretation and meaning. Yet several recent results indicate that neural representations in early retinotopic cortex reflect not just the sensory properties of the image, but also the perceived size and brightness of image regions. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging pattern analyses to ask whether the representation of an object in early retinotopic cortex changes when the object is recognized compared with when the same stimulus is presented but not recognized. Our data confirmed this hypothesis: the pattern of response in early retinotopic visual cortex to a two-tone “Mooney” image of an object was more similar to the response to the full grayscale photo version of the same image when observers knew what the two-tone image represented than when they did not. Further, in a second experiment, high-level interpretations actually overrode bottom-up stimulus information, such that the pattern of response in early retinotopic cortex to an identified two-tone image was more similar to the response to the photographic version of that stimulus than it was to the response to the identical two-tone image when it was not identified. Our findings are consistent with prior results indicating that perceived size and brightness affect representations in early retinotopic visual cortex and, further, show that even higher-level information—knowledge of object identity—also affects the representation of an object in early retinotopic cortex.

scholarly journals Spatiotemporal neural representations in high-level visual cortex evoked from sounds

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Matthew X Lowe ◽  
Yalda Mohsenzadeh ◽  
Benjamin Lahner ◽  
Santani Teng ◽  
Ian Charest ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
High Level

scholarly journals Contour junctions underlie neural representations of scene categories in high-level human visual cortex

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heeyoung Choo ◽  
Dirk B Walther
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Real World ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
Contour Length ◽  
Behavioral Experiments ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
Human Visual Cortex ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
High Level

Humans efficiently grasp complex visual environments, making highly consistent judgments of entry-level category despite their high variability in visual appearance. How does the human brain arrive at the invariant neural representations underlying categorization of real-world environments? We here show that the neural representation of visual environments in scenes-selective human visual cortex relies on statistics of contour junctions, which provide cues for the three-dimensional arrangement of surfaces in a scene. We manipulated line drawings of real-world environments such that statistics of contour orientations or junctions were disrupted. Manipulated and intact line drawings were presented to participants in an fMRI experiment. Scene categories were decoded from neural activity patterns in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the occipital place area (OPA) and other visual brain regions. Disruption of junctions but not orientations led to a drastic decrease in decoding accuracy in the PPA and OPA, indicating the reliance of these areas on intact junction statistics. Accuracy of decoding from early visual cortex, on the other hand, was unaffected by either image manipulation. We further show that the correlation of error patterns between decoding from the scene-selective brain areas and behavioral experiments is contingent on intact contour junctions. Finally, a searchlight analysis exposes the reliance of visually active brain regions on different sets of contour properties. Statistics of contour length and curvature dominate neural representations of scene categories in early visual areas and contour junctions in high-level scene-selective brain regions.

scholarly journals Temporal Processing Capacity in High-Level Visual Cortex Is Domain Specific

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (36) ◽  
pp. 12412-12424 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Stigliani ◽  
K. S. Weiner ◽  
K. Grill-Spector
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Temporal Processing ◽  
Processing Capacity ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
High Level

Semantic Structural Alignment of Neural Representational Spaces Enables Translation between English and Chinese Words

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (11) ◽  
pp. 1749-1759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin D. Zinszer ◽  
Andrew J. Anderson ◽  
Olivia Kang ◽  
Thalia Wheatley ◽  
Rajeev D. S. Raizada
Keyword(s):  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Structural Alignment ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
English Word ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
High Level

Two sets of items can share the same underlying conceptual structure, while appearing unrelated at a surface level. Humans excel at recognizing and using alignments between such underlying structures in many domains of cognition, most notably in analogical reasoning. Here we show that structural alignment reveals how different people's neural representations of word meaning are preserved across different languages, such that patterns of brain activation can be used to translate words from one language to another. Groups of Chinese and English speakers underwent fMRI scanning while reading words in their respective native languages. Simply by aligning structures representing the two groups' neural semantic spaces, we successfully infer all seven Chinese–English word translations. Beyond language translation, conceptual structural alignment underlies many aspects of high-level cognition, and this work opens the door to deriving many such alignments directly from neural representational content.

scholarly journals Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Deen ◽  
Hilary Richardson ◽  
Daniel D. Dilks ◽  
Atsushi Takahashi ◽  
Boris Keil ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
High Level

scholarly journals Visual search for object categories is predicted by the representational architecture of high-level visual cortex

2017 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 388-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Cohen ◽  
George A. Alvarez ◽  
Ken Nakayama ◽  
Talia Konkle
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Visual Search ◽  
Visual System ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Visual Search Task ◽  
Visual Object ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Object Categories ◽  
High Level

Visual search is a ubiquitous visual behavior, and efficient search is essential for survival. Different cognitive models have explained the speed and accuracy of search based either on the dynamics of attention or on similarity of item representations. Here, we examined the extent to which performance on a visual search task can be predicted from the stable representational architecture of the visual system, independent of attentional dynamics. Participants performed a visual search task with 28 conditions reflecting different pairs of categories (e.g., searching for a face among cars, body among hammers, etc.). The time it took participants to find the target item varied as a function of category combination. In a separate group of participants, we measured the neural responses to these object categories when items were presented in isolation. Using representational similarity analysis, we then examined whether the similarity of neural responses across different subdivisions of the visual system had the requisite structure needed to predict visual search performance. Overall, we found strong brain/behavior correlations across most of the higher-level visual system, including both the ventral and dorsal pathways when considering both macroscale sectors as well as smaller mesoscale regions. These results suggest that visual search for real-world object categories is well predicted by the stable, task-independent architecture of the visual system. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Here, we ask which neural regions have neural response patterns that correlate with behavioral performance in a visual processing task. We found that the representational structure across all of high-level visual cortex has the requisite structure to predict behavior. Furthermore, when directly comparing different neural regions, we found that they all had highly similar category-level representational structures. These results point to a ubiquitous and uniform representational structure in high-level visual cortex underlying visual object processing.

scholarly journals Atypical topography of high-level visual cortex is associated with reading difficulty

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 34a
Author(s):  
Emily Kubota ◽  
Jason D Yeatman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Reading Difficulty ◽  
High Level
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