Visual features as stepping stones toward semantics: Explaining object similarity in IT and perception with non-negative least squares.

ABSTRACT: Object similarity, in brain representations and conscious perception, must reflect a combination of the visual appearance of the objects on the one hand and the categories the objects belong to on the other. Indeed, visual object features and category membership have each been shown to contribute to the object representation in human inferior temporal (IT) cortex, as well as to object-similarity judgments. However, the explanatory power of features and categories has not been directly compared. Here, we investigate whether the IT object representation and similarity judgments are best explained by a categorical or a feature-based model. We use rich models (>100 dimensions) generated by human observers for a set of 96 real-world object images. The categorical model consists of a hierarchica

SUBMITTER: Jozwik KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4783588 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature