Behaviorally Relevant Abstract Object Identity Representation in the Human Parietal Cortex.

Abstract

The representation of object identity (including faces) is fundamental to human vision and shapes how we interact with the world. Although object representation has traditionally been associated with human occipital and temporal cortices, here we show, by measuring fMRI response patterns, that a region in the human parietal cortex can robustly represent task-relevant object identities. These representations are invariant to changes in a host of visual features, such as viewpoint, and reflect an abstract level of representation that has not previously been reported in the human parietal cortex. Critically, these neural representations are behaviorally relevant as they closely track the perceived object identities. Human parietal cortex thus participates in the moment-to-moment goal-directed visual information representation in the brain.