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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Neural representation of occluded objects in visual cortex

Fraser W Smith¹, Courtney Mansfield², Tim C Kietzmann³, Ian Charest⁴, Marieke Mur⁵, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte⁶; ¹University of East Anglia, ²University of Cambridge, ³Universität Osnabrück, ⁴Université de Montréal, ⁵University of Western Ontario, ⁶Columbia University

Presenter: Fraser W Smith

The ability of the human visual system to recognize occluded objects is striking, yet current models of vision struggle to account for this successfully. Our goal here was to understand what best explains neural representations of occluded objects under more realistic occlusion i.e., when objects occlude other objects. In an event-related fMRI design, participants performed a one-back task while being presented with unoccluded objects, objects occluded by another object, or cut out by a corresponding object silhouette. Decoding analyses showed that EVC responses to occluded objects were better determined by the visible features whereas in IT inferred features better predicted the response. Projection analyses showed that the weights assigned to occluded objects in IT were predicted by independent categorization judgements. Our results demonstrate that IT better decouples responses to real-world occluded objects with robust representations evident across multiple competing objects.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

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