Abstract
To the naïve observer, cubist paintings contain geometrical forms in which familiar objects are hardly recognizable, even in the presence of a meaningful title. We used fMRI to test whether a short training session about Cubism would facilitate object recognition in paintings by Picasso, Braque and Gris. Subjects, who had no formal art education, were presented with titled or untitled cubist paintings and scrambled images, and performed object recognition tasks. Relative to the control group, trained subjects recognized more objects in the paintings, their response latencies were significantly shorter, and they showed enhanced activation in the parahippocampal cortex, with a parametric increase in the amplitude of the fMRI signal as a function of the number of recognized objects. Moreover, trained subjects were slower to report not recognizing any familiar objects in the paintings and these longer response latencies were correlated with activation in a fronto-parietal network. These findings suggest that trained subjects adopted a visual search strategy and used contextual associations to perform the tasks. Our study supports the proactive brain framework, according to which the brain uses associations to generate predictions.
Highlights
IntroductionBehavioral and electrophysiological studies in humans and monkeys have suggested that object recognition is a rapid process that can be achieved within a few hundred milliseconds (Rousselet et al, 2002)
Object recognition is a highly developed visual skill in primates
Using fMRI, we have shown that representational paintings, which depict scenes cluttered with familiar objects, evoke stronger activation than indeterminate and abstract paintings in higher-tier visual areas and in the temporoparietal junction, whereas scrambled paintings evoke imagery-related activation in the precuneus and prefrontal cortex
Summary
Behavioral and electrophysiological studies in humans and monkeys have suggested that object recognition is a rapid process that can be achieved within a few hundred milliseconds (Rousselet et al, 2002). The process of parsing the world into meaningful objects is mediated by activation in ventral occipitotemporal cortex, the so called “what” pathway (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982; Goodale and Milner, 1992; Haxby et al, 1994). Recent functional brain imaging studies in humans have shown that objects elicit neural responses in a distributed cortical network that encompasses a wide expanse of extrastriate cortex (Ishai et al, 1999, 2000a; Haxby et al, 2001), where various object categories such as faces, animals, houses, tools, and body parts elicit distinct patterns of activation (Kanwisher et al, 1997; Aguirre et al, 1998; Epstein and Kanwisher, 1998; Ishai et al, 2000a; Downing et al, 2001; Yago and Ishai, 2006). Ambiguous figures (Kleinschmidt et al, 1998), illusory contours (Stanley and Rubin, 2003), binocular rivalry (Tong et al, 1998), and visual imagery (Ishai et al, 2000b, 2002; Mechelli et al, 2004) evoke activation in these object-responsive regions, suggesting that the visual system imposes top-down interpretations on ambiguous bottom-up retinal input
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