Revealing the distribution and dynamics of cortical representations in the visual processing of “stuff”

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Our visual experience of the world is multifaceted. Through visual information alone we simultaneously identify objects (chair /spoon / cat) at different levels of abstraction (my cat, pet, animate living thing); we recognise the materials that things are made from (wood / metal /fur); infer multisensory material qualities (hard / cold / fluffy); and we automatically access associated semantic concepts and affordances (“can sit on”, “can grasp”, “can stroke”). An important challenge in visual neuroscience is understanding the computations and neural mechanisms that give rise to these multidimensional representations. Yet, this challenge has mostly gone unmet, since much of the research investigating representations in the brain has focused on the visual recognition of objects and – more recently – materials largely independently from one another, failing to take into account the cooperative nature of the computations involved. The aim of the proposed project is to fill this gap and to elucidate the computations and neural mechanisms underlying our multidimensional visual representations. Specifically, the experiments aim to tease apart what image features and stimulus properties are represented where and when in the brain, and how the structure of these representations differs between different brain regions and time points. This will be achieved by intersecting investigations into the perception and neural processing of objects and materials using advanced computer-rendering methods and psychophysics, in combination with neuroimaging (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Magnetoencephalography), and multivariate analysis techniques.