Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewObject Domain and Modality in the Ventral Visual Pathway
Section snippets
Ventral Visual Cortex: Visual or Multi-Modal?
A core assumption of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience is that the brain processes information at various levels of representation, progressing from those closely tied to stimulus features to increasingly more general and abstract representations. One of the mysteries in this framework is the transition from modality specific representations – those explicable fully in the language of a given modality – to representations that capture other properties of the object – such as, for
Domain Specificity Effects across Different Modalities Are Different
When sighted individuals view pictures, various clusters in VOTC are more responsive to certain categories of objects, such as faces, bodies, tools, or places. The overall distribution of category preference follows a broad animate versus inanimate distinction, with a further differentiation within the inanimate domain between manipulable and non-manipulable objects. This results in a tripartite organization, from ventral medial regions (parahippocampal and medial fusiform) showing preference
Relationships between Visual and Other Object Properties
We formulate a novel conjecture about one of the factors that determines the nature of representations in VOTC: the difference across object domains in terms of modality effects lies in the relationship between visual shape and its functional relevance, understood as the types of computations it triggers downstream and ultimately its connectivity structure. Visual shape strongly constrains the way in which we interact physically with inanimate objects, but much less so and in a far less
Concluding Remarks
We began this review article by drawing attention to an empirical phenomenon regarding the effect of visual experience (and stimulus input) on object representations in higher-order visual cortex, showing that contrary to recent claims that this territory is multi-modal, there is a clear animate/inanimate dimension along which effects of modality differ. This empirical pattern motivates a novel conjecture about the nature of representations in VOTC: representation types are partly driven by the
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2013CB837300) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31221003, 31500882). A.C. was supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto.
Glossary
- Connectional fingerprints
- the unique set of anatomical or functional connections a cortical region owns, which could be measured as the vector of the cortical region's connection strengths with other cerebral regions.
- Functional fingerprints
- the unique response properties a cortical region exhibits, which could be measured as vector of the region's response strengths to a variety of stimuli or tasks (e.g., object categories).
- Multi-modal
- for the purpose of this review, multi-modal was used to mean
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