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Object-specific semantic coding in human perirhinal cortex.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Tyler, Lorraine K 

Abstract

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.

Description

Keywords

RSA, object recognition, perirhinal cortex, searchlight, semantic knowledge, Adult, Attention, Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Models, Biological, Oxygen, Photic Stimulation, Recognition (Psychology), Semantics, Visual Pathways, Young Adult

Journal Title

Journal of Neuroscience

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0270-6474
1529-2401

Volume Title

34

Publisher

Society for Neuroscience

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
European Research Council (249640)
This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007--2013)/ ERC Grant agreement no. 249640 to L.K.T.