Distributed Visual Category Processing Across Medial Superior Temporal and Lateral Intraparietal Cortices

Abstract

Categorization is an essential cognitive and perceptual process for recognition and decision making. The posterior parietal cortex (PPC), particularly the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area has been suggested to transform visual feature encoding into cognitive or abstract category representations. By contrast, areas closer to sensory input, such as the middle temporal (MT) area, encode stimulus features but not more abstract categorical information during categorization tasks. Here, we compare the contributions of PPC subregions in category computation by recording neuronal activity in the medial superior temporal (MST) and LIP areas during a categorization task. MST is a core motion processing area interconnected with MT, and often considered an intermediate processing stage between MT and LIP. Here we show that MST shows robust decision-correlated category encoding and working memory encoding similar to LIP, suggesting that MST plays a substantial role in cognitive computation, extending beyond its widely recognized role in visual motion processing.