Object recognition in clutter: cortical responses depend on the type of learning
Abstract
Theoretical studies suggest that the visual system uses prior knowledge of visual objects to recognize them in visual clutter, and posit that the strategies for recognizing objects in clutter may differ depending on whether or not the object was learned in clutter to begin with. We tested this hypothesis using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of human subjects. We trained subjects to recognize naturalistic, yet novel objects in strong or weak clutter. We then tested subjects' recognition performance for both sets of objects in strong clutter. We found many brain regions that were differentially responsive to objects during object recognition depending on whether they were learned in strong or weak clutter. In particular, the responses of the left fusiform gyrus (FG) reliably reflected, on a trial-to-trial basis, subjects' object recognition performance for objects learned in the presence of strong clutter. These results indicate that the visual system does not use a single, general-purpose mechanism to cope with clutter. Instead, there are two distinct spatial patterns of activation whose responses are attributable not to the visual context in which the objects were seen, but to the context in which the objects were learned.Citation
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Jun 19; 6:170ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3389/fnhum.2012.00170
Scopus Count
Related articles
- There Is a "U" in Clutter: Evidence for Robust Sparse Codes Underlying Clutter Tolerance in Human Vision.
- Authors: Cox PH, Riesenhuber M
- Issue date: 2015 Oct 21
- Clutter modulates the representation of target objects in the human occipitotemporal cortex.
- Authors: Erez Y, Yovel G
- Issue date: 2014 Mar
- Modeling visual clutter perception using proto-object segmentation.
- Authors: Yu CP, Samaras D, Zelinsky GJ
- Issue date: 2014 Jun 5
- Category selectivity in the ventral visual pathway confers robustness to clutter and diverted attention.
- Authors: Reddy L, Kanwisher N
- Issue date: 2007 Dec 4
- The effects of visual object priming on brain activation before and after recognition.
- Authors: James TW, Humphrey GK, Gati JS, Menon RS, Goodale MA
- Issue date: 2000 Sep 7