Integrative and distinctive coding of visual and conceptual object features in the ventral visual stream

A significant body of research in cognitive neuroscience is aimed at understanding how object concepts are represented in the human brain. However, it remains unknown whether and where the visual and abstract conceptual features that define an object concept are integrated. We addressed this issue by comparing the neural pattern similarities among object-evoked fMRI responses with behavior-based models that independently captured the visual and conceptual similarities among these stimuli. Our results revealed evidence for distinctive coding of visual features in lateral occipital cortex, and conceptual features in the temporal pole and parahippocampal cortex. By contrast, we found evidence for integrative coding of visual and conceptual object features in perirhinal cortex. The neuroanatomical specificity of this effect was highlighted by results from a searchlight analysis. Taken together, our findings suggest that perirhinal cortex uniquely supports the representation of fully specified object concepts through the integration of their visual and conceptual features.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  eLife

• Publication date

  2018-02-02

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7554/eLife.31873PMID 29393853PMCID 5832413
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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