Grasping at the organization of object knowledge: testing different object-related dimensions as organizational principles of ventral temporal cortex.

Abstract

In our daily lives we encounter a myriad of things with which we might need to interact as we navigate our environment. Mental representations of these things must be computed and stored in our brains to be manipulated to support cognition. How are such representations organized in the brain? Several proposals have been put forth on what the principles of organization of object information in the brain might be: within ventral temporal cortex - regions thought to support object recognition - possible dimensions include the animacy status of target stimuli, their real size, their texture and material properties, and potentially their graspable status, amongst others. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivariate approaches to discriminate patterns of activation for different categories of objects to test the role of these dimensions as organizing principles of object information in the brain. We show that pattern discriminability between different categories of objects does not seem to follow differences in their animacy status in any continuous way. Moreover, graspability of the target stimuli and their haptic texture properties are better predictors of representational content within ventral temporal cortex than animacy and real size. These results are in line with recent studies demonstrating the importance of computational contingencies superimposed by bi-directional functional coupling between parietal regions dedicated to the processing of object manipulation and grasping and ventral temporal regions responsible for object recognition, potentially involving material and texture processing.