Category-selective processing in the two visual pathways as a function of stimulus degradation by noise

Abstract

Understanding the organising principles and functional properties of the primate brain's numerous visually responsive cortical regions is one of the major goals in cognitive neuroscience. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have revealed that neural responses in higher-order visual cortex are shaped by object categories, task context, and spatiotemporal regularities. Beyond these properties, visual processing in the ventral pathway has been shown to be tightly linked to perceptual awareness, while the evidence regarding dorsal visual processing and awareness is mixed. Most previous studies targeting the dorsal pathway have used dichotomous “visible versus invisible” experimental designs and interocular suppression paradigms to modulate stimulus visibility. In this fMRI study, we sought to investigate category-selective processing of faces and tools in the ventral and dorsal visual streams as a function of parametric stimulus degradation by noise. Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics provide strong evidence for a linear relationship between category-selective processing and stimulus information in both visual pathways. Overall, multivariate category decoding accuracies turned out to be lower in the dorsal pathway. We discuss our results within the context of the emerging notion of highly interconnected visual streams, and provide an outlook on how future studies may help to further refine our understanding of the functional role of the dorsal pathway in visual object processing.