Uncovering the core dimensions of visual object representations

Our ability to interact with our visual world is a remarkable feat: Despite drastic changes in their visual appearance, we can effortlessly make sense of thousands of objects and carry out meaningful actions on them. To understand the nature of our visual representations that underlie this ability, a central goal of cognitive neuroscience is to determine the properties – or dimensions – that make up our representational space of objects. While much progress has been made at identifying the building blocks of visual processing in brain and cognition, our scientific understanding of visual representations remains fundamentally limited by (1) our ability to capture the complexity and variability of our visual world for determining the dimensions underlying our object representations and (2) the difficulty in disentangling visual and semantic contributions to these representations. COREDIM is an ambitious, interdisciplinary program that aims at overcoming these limitations and provide a detailed, interpretable characterization of the core dimensions underlying visual object representations. To reach this goal, COREDIM capitalizes on extensive, targeted sampling of behavioral and neuroimaging data and cutting-edge artificial intelligence methods that allow the identification of interpretable representational dimensions. Project 1 aims at uncovering the core representational dimensions of objects across ventral visual cortex, using a biologically-inspired neural network model tailored to each individual’s functional neuroanatomy and trained to identify the most informative stimuli. Project 2 will identify the relative role of vision and semantic knowledge in shaping our core representational dimensions, through experimental manipulations at the level of the stimulus, task, and with cross-species comparisons. Together, COREDIM promises to transform our understanding of visual processing, laying the foundation for a comprehensive characterization of visual cortex function.