Neural dynamics of real-world object vision that guide behaviour

Abstract

1Vision involves complex neuronal dynamics that link the sensory stream to behaviour. To capture the richness and complexity of the visual world and the behaviour it entails, we used an ecologically valid task with a rich set of real-world object images. We investigated how human brain activity, resolved in space with functional MRI and in time with magnetoencephalography, links the sensory stream to behavioural responses. We found that behaviour-related brain activity emerged rapidly in the ventral visual pathway within 200ms of stimulus onset. The link between stimuli, brain activity, and behaviour could not be accounted for by either category membership or visual features (as provided by an artificial deep neural network model). Our results identify behaviourally-relevant brain activity during object vision, and suggest that object representations guiding behaviour are complex and can neither be explained by visual features or semantic categories alone. Our findings support the view that visual representations in the ventral visual stream need to be understood in terms of their relevance to behaviour, and highlight the importance of complex behavioural assessment for human brain mapping.