Representing experience over time: sustained sensory patterns and transient frontroparietal patterns

Instances of sustained stationary sensory input are ubiquitous. However, previous work focused almost exclusively on the transient onset responses. This presents a critical challenge for neural theories of consciousness, which should account for the full temporal extent of experience. Here we use intracranial recordings from human patients viewing diverse images in multiple durations. In sensory regions, we reveal that despite dramatic changes in activation magnitude, the distributed representation of categories and exemplars remains sustained and stable. In contrast, in frontoparietal regions we find transient content representation at stimulus onset. Our results highlight the connection between the anatomical and temporal correlates of experience. To the extent perception is sustained, it may rely on sensory representations, and to the extent it is discrete, centered on perceptual updating, it may rely on frontoparietal representations.