Differential Sustained and Transient Temporal Processing Across Visual Streams

Abstract

How do high-level visual regions process the temporal aspects of our visual experience? While the temporal sensitivity of early visual cortex has been studied with fMRI in humans, temporal processing in high-level visual cortex is largely unknown. By modeling neural responses with millisecond precision in separate sustained and transient channels, and introducing a flexible encoding framework that captures differences in neural temporal integration time windows and response nonlinearities, we predict fMRI responses across visual cortex for stimuli ranging from 33 ms to 20 s. Using this innovative approach, we discovered that lateral category-selective regions respond to visual transients associated with stimulus onsets and offsets but not sustained visual information. Thus, lateral category-selective regions compute moment-tomoment visual transitions, but not stable features of the visual input. In contrast, ventral category-selective regions respond to both sustained and transient components of the visual input. Responses to sustained stimuli exhibit adaptation, whereas responses to transient stimuli are surprisingly larger for stimulus offsets than onsets. This large offset transient response may reflect a memory trace of the stimulus when it is no longer visible, whereas the onset transient response may reflect rapid processing of new items. Together, these findings reveal previously unconsidered, fundamental temporal mechanisms that distinguish visual streams in the human brain. Importantly, our results underscore the promise of modeling brain responses with millisecond precision to understand the underlying neural computations.\n\nAUTHOR SUMMARYHow does the brain encode the timing of our visual experience? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a temporal encoding model with millisecond resolution, we discovered that visual regions in the lateral and ventral processing streams fundamentally differ in their temporal processing of the visual input. Regions in lateral temporal cortex process visual transients associated with stimulus onsets and offsets but not the unchanging aspects of the visual input. That is, they compute moment-to-moment changes in the visual input. In contrast, regions in ventral temporal cortex process both stable and transient components, with the former exhibiting adaptation. Surprisingly, in these ventral regions responses to stimulus offsets were larger than onsets. We suggest that the former may reflect a memory trace of the stimulus, when it is no longer visible, and the latter may reflect rapid processing of new items at stimulus onset. Together, these findings (i) reveal a fundamental temporal mechanism that distinguishes visual streams and (ii) highlight both the importance and utility of modeling brain responses with millisecond precision to understand the temporal dynamics of neural computations in the human brain.