Perirhinal cortex supports object perception by integrating over visuospatial sequences

Abstract

Perception unfolds across multiple timescales. For humans and other primates, many object-centric visual attributes can be inferred at a glance (i.e., given 200ms). Next, we leverage a stimulus set that enables us to characterize PRC involvement in these temporally extended visual inferences. We find that human visual inferences at a glance resemble the deficits observed in PRC-lesioned human participants. Not surprisingly, by measuring gaze behaviors during these temporally extended viewing periods, we find that participants sequentially sample task-relevant features via multiple saccades/fixations. These patterns of visuospatial attention are both reliable across participants and necessary for PRC-dependent visual inferences. These data reveal complementary neural systems that support visual object perception: VTC provides a rich set of visual features at a glance, while PRC is able to integrate over the sequential outputs of VTC to support object-level inferences.