A multi-methodological, integrative investigation of how visual representations underlie behaviour.

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How we interact with the world around us is reliant on our brain's ability to process incoming sensory information. For example, we are faced with a myriad of visual information in our immediate environment and whether/how we act on this information depends on a number of cognitive processes and factors including what we choose to pay attention to (selective attention), how we perceive the incoming visual information (visual perception), our previous personal experiences (episodic memory) and our existing knowledge of the world (semantic memory). To date, a large amount of research has investigated how the brain subserves these cognitive processes and how individual processes interact with visual information. There has, however, been relatively little work on how these various cognitive processes interact with each other and act, in concert, on visual information. This is crucial since even a simple behavioural act such as reaching for food is not the result of a single cognitive process but rather interactions between numerous processes. The current research proposal, therefore, aims to use a number of different experimental techniques to understand how multiple cognitive processes interact with visual information in the human brain to give rise to behaviour, with a particular focus on spatial scenes and objects, two of the most common types of visual categories that we encounter on a daily basis. Functional neuroimaging will be used to explore the location and timing of brain activity, magnetic stimulation will be used to investigate the importance of different brain regions to specific processes, and computational modelling will allow experimental data to be interpreted within a theoretical framework. This research will provide novel insights into human behaviour in response to visual information and the brain mechanisms that enable this behaviour.