Abstract
We conducted two event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to investigate the neural substrates of visual object recognition in humans. We used a repetition-priming method with visual stimuli recurring at unpredictable intervals, either with the same appearance or with changes in size, viewpoint or exemplar. Lateral occipital and posterior inferior temporal cortex showed lower activity for repetitions of both real and non-sense objects; fusiform and left inferior frontal regions showed decreases for repetitions of only real objects. Repetition of different exemplars with the same name affected only the left inferior frontal cortex. Crucially, priming-induced decreases in activity of the right fusiform cortex depended on whether the three-dimensional objects were repeated with the same viewpoint, regardless of whether retinal image size changed; left fusiform decreases were independent of both viewpoint and size. These data show that dissociable subsystems in ventral visual cortex maintain distinct view-dependent and view-invariant object representations.
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Acknowledgements
We thank R. Ellis, M. Tucker and M. Tarr for some of the stimuli, and the radiographers at the Functional Imaging Laboratory for technical assistance. This work was supported by Wellcome Programme grants to R.J.D. and J.D., a Wellcome Fellowship to R.N.H. and a Medical Research Council (UK) Co-operative Grant for 'Analysis of cognitive impairment and imaging of cognition' at University College London. J.D. holds a Royal Society–Wolfson Research Merit Award.
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Vuilleumier, P., Henson, R., Driver, J. et al. Multiple levels of visual object constancy revealed by event-related fMRI of repetition priming. Nat Neurosci 5, 491–499 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn839
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn839
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