Object-Specific Semantic Coding in Human Perirhinal Cortex
By Alex Clarke, Lorraine K. Tyler. 2014
243 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Category-specificity has been demonstrated in the human posterior ventral temporal cortex for a variety of object categories. Although object representations within the ventral visual pathway must be sufficiently rich and complex to support the recognition of individual objects, little is known about how specific objects are represented. Here, we used representational similarity analysis to determine what different kinds of object information are reflected in fMRI activation patterns and uncover the relationship between categorical and object-specific semantic representations. Our results show a gradient of informational specificity along the ventral stream from representations of image-based visual properties in early visual cortex, to categorical representations in the posterior ventral stream. A key finding showed that object-specific semantic information is uniquely represented in the perirhinal cortex, which was also increasingly engaged for objects that are more semantically confusable. These findings suggest a key role for the perirhinal cortex in representing and processing object-specific semantic information that is more critical for highly confusable objects. Our findings extend current distributed models by showing coarse dissociations between objects in posterior ventral cortex, and fine-grained distinctions between objects supported by the anterior medial temporal lobes, including the perirhinal cortex, which serve to integrate complex object information.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
- German Ignacio Parisi
- Stefan Wermter
- Maureen Ritchey
- Cornelius Weber
- Dwight J. Kravitz
- Jun Tani
- Alex Clarke
- Chris L. Baker
In Sensory Systems
Citations in the corpus
- Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations With Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization (2018, background): “…studies evidence that distributed representations in high-level visual regions of the neocortex (semantic) are less sparse than those of the hippocampus (episodic) and where related categories are represented by overlapping neural codes (Clarke and Tyler, 2014; Yamins et al., 2018).”
- Neural reactivation in parietal cortex enhances memory for episodically linked information (2018, background): “Alternatively, if the testing effect is mediated by reactivation of item-to-item semantic associations, we would expect larger neural reactivation during retrieval practice in the AT network, given extensive evidence linking these regions to semantic cognition (29, 30).”
- Similarity judgments and cortical visual responses reflect different properties of object and scene categories in naturalistic images (2018, background): “HMax, DNN) do not capture semantic or conceptual information and that an additional level of representation is required (Clarke and Tyler, 2014; Clarke et al., 2015; Devereux et al., 2018).”