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What's there, distinctly, when and where?

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 332–333 (2014)Cite this article

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A study shows the transience of early visual representations (while the stimulus is still on) and the persistence of higher representations (outlasting the stimulus) as various categorical distinctions emerge at staggered latencies. Rather than slavishly following the stimulus, representations interact through recurrent signals to infer what's there.

When you open your eyes to an image, a wave of activity sweeps through your brain. From lower to higher visual areas, the image is represented and re-represented at increasing levels of abstraction. At the same time, signals feed back from higher to lower areas. This dynamic process gives rise to your interpretation of the image, imposing categorical boundaries that are in the eye—or, more precisely, in the brain—of the beholder, and emphasizing what the image means to you. For each object-category distinction ('what'), researchers would like to understand when (how long after stimulus onset) it becomes explicitly represented where in the brain (in which visual area). The temporal and spatial aspects of human object recognition have so far been studied separately. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Cichy et al.1 devised a clever way to relate the two and determine what distinctions between pairs of objects2 emerge when and where in the brain.

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Figure 1: The what, when and where of perceptual processing in the brain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marieke Mur & Nikolaus Kriegeskorte are at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Medical Research Council, Cambridge, UK.,

    Marieke Mur & Nikolaus Kriegeskorte

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  1. Marieke Mur
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  2. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
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Correspondence to Nikolaus Kriegeskorte.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Mur, M., Kriegeskorte, N. What's there, distinctly, when and where?. Nat Neurosci 17, 332–333 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3661

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