Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- 1 The Evolution of Object Categorization and the Challenge of Image Abstraction
- 2 A Strategy for Understanding How the Brain Accomplishes Object Recognition
- 3 Visual Recognition Circa 2008
- 4 On What It Means to See, and WhatWe Can Do About It
- 5 Generic Object Recognition by Inference of 3-D Volumetric Parts
- 6 What Has fMRI Taught Us About Object Recognition?
- 7 Object Recognition Through Reasoning About Functionality: A Survey of Related Work
- 8 The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception to Swift Extinction
- 9 Words and Pictures: Categories, Modifiers, Depiction, and Iconography
- 10 Structural Representation of Object Shape in the Brain
- 11 Learning Hierarchical Compositional Representations of Object Structure
- 12 Object Categorization in Man, Monkey, and Machine: Some Answers and Some Open Questions
- 13 Learning Compositional Models for Object Categories from Small Sample Sets
- 14 The Neurophysiology and Computational Mechanisms of Object Representation
- 15 From Classification to Full Object Interpretation
- 16 Visual Object Discovery
- 17 Towards Integration of Different Paradigms in Modeling, Representation, and Learning of Visual Categories
- 18 Acquisition and Disruption of Category Specificity in the Ventral Visual Stream: The Case of Late Developing and Vulnerable Face-Related Cortex
- 19 Using Simple Features and Relations
- 20 The Proactive Brain: Using Memory-Based Predictions in Visual Recognition
- 21 Spatial Pyramid Matching
- 22 Visual Learning for Optimal Decisions in the Human Brain
- 23 Shapes and Shock Graphs: From Segmented Shapes to Shapes Embedded in Images
- 24 Neural Encoding of Scene Statistics for Surface and Object Inference
- 25 Medial Models for Vision
- 26 Multimodal Categorization
- 27 Comparing 2-D Images of 3-D Objects
- Index
- Plate section
6 - What Has fMRI Taught Us About Object Recognition?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- 1 The Evolution of Object Categorization and the Challenge of Image Abstraction
- 2 A Strategy for Understanding How the Brain Accomplishes Object Recognition
- 3 Visual Recognition Circa 2008
- 4 On What It Means to See, and WhatWe Can Do About It
- 5 Generic Object Recognition by Inference of 3-D Volumetric Parts
- 6 What Has fMRI Taught Us About Object Recognition?
- 7 Object Recognition Through Reasoning About Functionality: A Survey of Related Work
- 8 The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception to Swift Extinction
- 9 Words and Pictures: Categories, Modifiers, Depiction, and Iconography
- 10 Structural Representation of Object Shape in the Brain
- 11 Learning Hierarchical Compositional Representations of Object Structure
- 12 Object Categorization in Man, Monkey, and Machine: Some Answers and Some Open Questions
- 13 Learning Compositional Models for Object Categories from Small Sample Sets
- 14 The Neurophysiology and Computational Mechanisms of Object Representation
- 15 From Classification to Full Object Interpretation
- 16 Visual Object Discovery
- 17 Towards Integration of Different Paradigms in Modeling, Representation, and Learning of Visual Categories
- 18 Acquisition and Disruption of Category Specificity in the Ventral Visual Stream: The Case of Late Developing and Vulnerable Face-Related Cortex
- 19 Using Simple Features and Relations
- 20 The Proactive Brain: Using Memory-Based Predictions in Visual Recognition
- 21 Spatial Pyramid Matching
- 22 Visual Learning for Optimal Decisions in the Human Brain
- 23 Shapes and Shock Graphs: From Segmented Shapes to Shapes Embedded in Images
- 24 Neural Encoding of Scene Statistics for Surface and Object Inference
- 25 Medial Models for Vision
- 26 Multimodal Categorization
- 27 Comparing 2-D Images of 3-D Objects
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Introduction
Humans can effortlessly recognize objects in a fraction of a second despite large variability in the appearance of objects (Thorpe et al. 1996). What are the underlying representations and computations that enable this remarkable human ability? One way to answer these questions is to investigate the neural mechanisms of object recognition in the human brain. With the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) about 15 years ago, neuroscientists and psychologists began to examine the neural bases of object recognition in humans. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an attractive method because it is a noninvasive technique that allows multiple measurements of brain activation in the same awake behaving human. Among noninvasive techniques, it provides the best spatial resolution currently available, enabling us to localize cortical activations in the spatial resolution of millimeters (as fine as 1 mm) and at a reasonable time scale (in the order of seconds).
Before the advent of fMRI, knowledge about the function of the ventral stream was based on single-unit electrophysiology measurements in monkeys and on lesion studies. These studies showed that neurons in the monkey inferotemporal (IT) cortex respond to shapes (Fujita et al. 1992) and complex objects such as faces (Desimone et al. 1984), and that lesions to the ventral stream can produce specific deficits in object recognition, such as agnosia (inability to recognize objects) and prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces, Farah 1995). However, interpreting lesion data is complicated because lesions are typically diffuse (usually more than one region is damaged), typically disrupt both a cortical region and its connectivity, and are not replicable across patients.
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- Information
- Object CategorizationComputer and Human Vision Perspectives, pp. 102 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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