ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Task context impacts visual object processing differentially across the cortex.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 83 papers.
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83 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Article
- Neural Patterns Reveal Lateral Occipital Complex Representation of Ensemble Mean Orientation.eNeuro · 2026Article
- Low-dimensional and optimised representations of high-level information in the expert brain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Task context is broadly encoded in the human brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Shared representations in brains and models reveal a two-route cortical organization during scene perception.Communications biology · 2026Article
- An increasingly efficient narrowband object-recognition channel along the ventral stream.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex.Cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Visual semantic tuning across the cortex shifts between tasks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- What makes memories vivid?Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Top-down perceptual inference shaping the activity of early visual cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neural representations of visual categories are dynamically tailored to the discrimination required by the task.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Scene consistency enhances state representations of real-world objects.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A large-scale MEG and EEG dataset for object recognition in naturalistic scenes.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Object representations drive emotion schemas across a large and diverse set of daily-life scenes.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Task structure tailors the geometry of neural representations in human lateral prefrontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Identifying and characterizing scene representations relevant for categorization behavior.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- The representation of abstract goals in working memory is supported by task-congruent neural geometry.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- High-level visual prediction errors in early visual cortex.PLoS biology · 2024Article
23 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
Perception reflects an integration of "bottom-up" (sensory-driven) and "top-down" (internally generated) signals. Although models of visual processing often emphasize the central role of feed-forward hierarchical processing, less is known about the impact of top-down signals on complex visual representations. Here, we investigated whether and how the observer's goals modulate object processing across the cortex. We examined responses elicited by a diverse set of objects under six distinct tasks, focusing on either physical (e.g., color) or conceptual properties (e.g., man-made). Critically, the same stimuli were presented in all tasks, allowing us to investigate how task impacts the neural representations of identical visual input. We found that task has an extensive and differential impact on object processing across the cortex. First, we found task-dependent representations in the ventral temporal and prefrontal cortex. In particular, although object identity could be decoded from the multivoxel response within task, there was a significant reduction in decoding across tasks. In contrast, the early visual cortex evidenced equivalent decoding within and across tasks, indicating task-independent representations. Second, task information was pervasive and present from the earliest stages of object processing. However, although the responses of the ventral temporal, prefrontal, and parietal cortex enabled decoding of both the type of task (physical/conceptual) and the specific task (e.g., color), the early visual cortex was not sensitive to type of task and could only be used to decode individual physical tasks. Thus, object processing is highly influenced by the behavioral goal of the observer, highlighting how top-down signals constrain and inform the formation of visual representations.
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