From Dr. Tolga Çukur: ”In this collaborative effort with Burcu Ayşen Ürgen, PhD, we report the first evidence for a dynamic attentional mechanism during visual search for action categories, which reallocates neural resources to represent the target action. You can check our results on our interactive brain viewer.”
Abstract
Object and action perception in cluttered dynamic natural scenes relies on efficient allocation of limited brain resources to prioritize the attended targets over distractors. It has been suggested that during visual search for objects, distributed semantic representation of hundreds of object categories is warped to expand the representation of targets. Yet, little is known about whether and where in the brain visual search for action categories modulates semantic representations. To address this fundamental question, we studied brain activity recorded from five subjects (1 female) via functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed natural movies and searched for either communication or locomotion actions. We find that attention directed to action categories elicits tuning shifts that warp semantic representations broadly across neocortex, and that these shifts interact with intrinsic selectivity of cortical voxels for target actions. These results suggest that attention serves to facilitate task performance during social interactions by dynamically shifting semantic selectivity towards target actions, and that tuning shifts are a general feature of conceptual representations in the brain.
Paper: https://lnkd.in/e2hmcUQu
Brain Viewer: https://lnkd.in/eAkvGUGy