Abstract Detail

Learning to recognize degraded objects is associated with a greater match to the objects' template fMRI activation patterns in Lateral Occipital Cortex

33.323, Sunday, May 12, 8:30 am - 12:30 pm, Royal Ballroom 6-8
Session: Object recognition: Neural mechanisms

Zvi Roth^1,2, Ehud Zohary^1,2,3; ¹Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ²Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ³Department of Neurobiology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

One feature of visual processing in the ventral stream is that cortical responses gradually depart from the physical aspects of the visual stimulus and become correlated with perceptual experience. Thus, unlike early retinotopic areas, the responses in object-related lateral occipital complex (LOC) are typically immune to parameter changes (e.g. contrast, viewpoint, etc.) when these do not affect recognition. Here, we use a complementary approach to highlight changes in brain activity that result solely from a perceptual state shift. We focus on LOC and early visual cortex (EVC) and compare their fMRI responses to degraded object images, prior to, and following perceptual learning that renders initially unrecognized objects, identifiable. Using three complementary analyses, we find that in LOC, learned recognition is associated with a change in the multi-voxel response pattern to degraded object images, such that the response becomes significantly more correlated with the pattern evoked by the intact version of the same image. This provides further evidence that the coding in LOC reflects the Gestalt, perceptual level of representation of visual objects

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