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Preferential encoding of visual categories in parietal cortex compared with prefrontal cortex.

ABSTRACT: The ability to recognize the behavioral relevance, or category membership, of sensory stimuli is critical for interpreting the meaning of events in our environment. Neurophysiological studies of visual categorization have found categorical representations of stimuli in prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area that is closely associated with cognitive and executive functions. Recent studies have also identified neuronal category signals in parietal areas that are typically associated with visual-spatial processing. It has been proposed that category-related signals in parietal cortex and other visual areas may result from 'top-down' feedback from PFC. We directly compared neuronal activity in the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area and PFC in monkeys performing a visual motion categorization task. We found that LIP showed stronger, more reliable and shorter latency category signals than PFC. These findings suggest that LIP is strongly involved in visual categorization and argue against the idea that parietal category signals arise as a result of feedback from PFC during this task.

SUBMITTER: Swaminathan SK

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3293250 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Preferential encoding of visual categories in parietal cortex compared with prefrontal cortex.

Swaminathan Sruthi K SK Freedman David J DJ

Nature neuroscience 20120115 2

The ability to recognize the behavioral relevance, or category membership, of sensory stimuli is critical for interpreting the meaning of events in our environment. Neurophysiological studies of visual categorization have found categorical representations of stimuli in prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area that is closely associated with cognitive and executive functions. Recent studies have also identified neuronal category signals in parietal areas that are typically associated with visual-spatial ...[more]

PMID: 22246435

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Project description:Natural environments convey information through multiple sensory modalities, all of which contribute to people's percepts. Although it has been shown that visual or auditory content of scene categories can be decoded from brain activity, it remains unclear how humans represent scene information beyond a specific sensory modality domain. To address this question, we investigated how categories of scene images and sounds are represented in several brain regions. A group of healthy human subjects (both sexes) participated in the present study, where their brain activity was measured with fMRI while viewing images or listening to sounds of different real-world environments. We found that both visual and auditory scene categories can be decoded not only from modality-specific areas, but also from several brain regions in the temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Intriguingly, only in the PFC, but not in any other regions, categories of scene images and sounds appear to be represented in similar activation patterns, suggesting that scene representations in PFC are modality-independent. Furthermore, the error patterns of neural decoders indicate that category-specific neural activity patterns in the middle and superior frontal gyri are tightly linked to categorization behavior. Our findings demonstrate that complex scene information is represented at an abstract level in the PFC, regardless of the sensory modality of the stimulus.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Our experience in daily life includes multiple sensory inputs, such as images, sounds, or scents from the surroundings, which all contribute to our understanding of the environment. Here, for the first time, we investigated where and how in the brain information about the natural environment from multiple senses is merged to form modality-independent representations of scene categories. We show direct decoding of scene categories across sensory modalities from patterns of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We also conclusively tie these neural representations to human categorization behavior by comparing patterns of errors between a neural decoder and behavior. Our findings suggest that PFC is a central hub for integrating sensory information and computing modality-independent representations of scene categories.

Dataset Information

Preferential encoding of visual categories in parietal cortex compared with prefrontal cortex.

Publications

Preferential encoding of visual categories in parietal cortex compared with prefrontal cortex.

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