Size Precedes View: Developmental Emergence of Invariant Object Representations in Lateral Occipital Complex

Abstract

Visual motion perception is fundamental to many aspects of visual perception. Visual motion perception has long been associated with the dorsal (parietal) pathway and the involvement of the ventral 'form' (temporal) visual pathway has not been considered critical for normal motion perception. Here, we evaluated this view by examining whether circumscribed damage to ventral visual cortex impaired motion perception. The perception of motion in basic, non-form tasks (motion coherence and motion detection) and complex structure-from-motion, for a wide range of motion speeds, all centrally displayed, was assessed in five patients with a circumscribed lesion to either the right or left ventral visual pathway. Patients with a right, but not with a left, ventral visual lesion displayed widespread impairments in central motion perception even for non-form motion, for both slow and for fast speeds, and this held true independent of the integrity of areas MT/V5, V3A or parietal regions. In contrast with the traditional view in which only the dorsal visual stream is critical for motion perception, these novel findings implicate a more distributed circuit in which the integrity of the right ventral visual pathway is also necessary even for the perception of non-form motion.

A response time cost when different representations of an attended object are integrated

“…Planned comparisons revealed that all change types were responded to more slowly than the no-change controls (all P values ≤ .001, paired samples t-tests). When the change trials were compared against each other, it was found that Size changes were responded to more quickly than Object changes [t(22) = 5.86, P < .001], consistent with the idea that size information is processed very early in the processing stream, and, therefore, can be accessed for behaviour more quickly than laterprocessed object information (Larsen & Bundesen, 1978;Larsen, Bundesen, Kyllingsbaek, Paulson, & Law, 2000;Nishimura et al, 2015). More critically, it was found that Combination changes were responded to more slowly than Size changes [t(22) = 2.39, P = .026], but more quickly than Object changes [t(22) = 4.74, P < .001].…”

“…For example, object-level representations are housed later in the processing stream than representations of basic visual features like size (Grill-Spector et al, 1999;Nishimura, Scherf, Zachariou, Tarr, & Behrmann, 2015). Nonetheless, integration can occur between distantly held representations.…”

The Role of Visual Association Cortex in Associative Memory Formation across Development

“…In contrast to the fusiform gyrus, however, the LOC is thought to reach adult-like maturity by 5–8 years and does not show age-related changes in size or location beyond this age (Grill-Spector, Golarai, & Gabrieli, 2008; Golarai et al, 2007; Scherf et al, 2007). Although a recent study finds more fine-grained object recognition (e.g., size and view invariance) takes longer to develop in LOC (Nishimura, Scherf, Zachariou, Tarr, & Behrmann, 2015), this study did not require this level of object recognition.…”

Temporal contiguity training does not affect size-tolerant representations in object-selective cortex

“…The emergence of tolerance to different transformations has been shown to follow different developmental trajectories. A recent study on the neural basis of invariance has corroborated this finding, showing that size invariance develops earlier than view invariance (Nishimura et al, 2015).…”