The ventral visual pathway: an expanded neural framework for the processing of object quality.

By Dwight J. Kravitz, Kadharbatcha S. Saleem, Chris L. Baker, Leslie G. Ungerleider, Mortimer Mishkin. 2013

1,121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the original characterization of the ventral visual pathway our knowledge of its neuroanatomy, functional properties, and extrinsic targets has grown considerably. Here we synthesize this recent evidence and propose that the ventral pathway is best understood as a recurrent occipitotemporal network containing neural representations of object quality both utilized and constrained by at least six distinct cortical and subcortical systems. Each system serves its own specialized behavioral, cognitive, or affective function, collectively providing the raison d’etre for the ventral visual pathway. This expanded framework contrasts with the depiction of the ventral visual pathway as a largely serial staged hierarchy that culminates in singular object representations for utilization mainly by ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and, more parsimoniously than this account, incorporates attentional, contextual, and feedback effects.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond Skip Connections: Top-Down Modulation for Object Detection (2016, background): “There is strong evidence of such top-down context, feedback and lateral processing in the human visual pathway [7, 13, 15, 25, 28, 30, 31, 37, 53, 54]; wherein, the topdown signals are responsible for modulating low-level features [13, 15, 37, 53, 54] as well as act as attentional mechanism for sele”
Human Pose Estimation with Iterative Error Feedback (2015, background): “Feature computation in these models is purely feedforward, however, unlike in the human visual system where feedback connections abound [9, 19, 20].”
Deep Back-Projection Networks for Super-Resolution (2018, background): “In contrast to this purely feed-forward approach, human visual system is believed to use a feedback connection to simply guide the task for the relevant results [9, 23, 25].”
TRIPLE REPRESENTATION OF LANGUAGE, WORKING MEMORY, SOCIAL AND EMOTION PROCESSING IN THE CEREBELLUM: CONVERGENT EVIDENCE FROM TASK AND SEED-BASED RESTING-STATE FMRI ANALYSES IN A SINGLE LARGE COHORT (2018, background): “3, areas shown in black and white) might correspond to regions involved in primary processing of visual stimuli (primary visual cortex) and face qualities other than emotion (visual association cortex, inferior temporal gyrus; Kravitz et al., 2013).”
The Invariance Hypothesis Implies Domain-Specific Regions in Visual Cortex (2014, background): “For an alternative perspective, see [11].”
Similarity judgments and cortical visual responses reflect different properties of object and scene categories in naturalistic images (2018, background): “The presence of responses in both human and non-human primate visual cortex specific to a given category or type of object suggest there may be a close correspondence between responses in highlevel visual cortex and behavioral similarity judgments (Kravitz et al., 2013; Grill-Spector and Weiner, 201”
STNet: Selective Tuning of Convolutional Networks for Object Localization (2017, background): “Inspired by physiological and psychophysical findings, many attempts have been made to understand how the visual cortex processes information throughout the visual hierarchy [6, 15].”
Orchestrate Latent Expertise: Advancing Online Continual Learning with Multi-Level Supervision and Reverse Self-Distillation (2024, background): “Inspired by the hierarchical advantages of the mammalian visual processing system [15, 19, 29, 33, 55, 70], we pro-pose to inject multi-level supervision in our continual model and aggregate the skills from different experts within it (see Fig.”
The neural activity of auditory conscious perception (2025, unknown): “Multiple previous studies across sensory modalities, including in vision (Herman et al., 2019; Kravitz et al., 2013; Kronemer et al., 2022; van Vugt et al., 2018), audition (Bizley and Cohen, 2013; Poremba and Mishkin, 2007), and touch (Gusso et al., 2022; Rullmann et al., 2019), have well…”
Top-down selection of visual working memory contents is supported by alpha-band phase-synchronized oscillatory networks (2025, unknown): “…the early visual areas (V1-V3) and the lateral occipital cortex (LOC), that is, in areas that are involved in object perception ( Hansen et al., 2007; Kravitz et al., 2013; Tootell & Hadjikhani, 2001), but also in the dorsal visual stream regions, whose activity is related to the processing of…”