Integrated Contextual Representation for Objects’ Identities and Their Locations

Nurit Gronau, Maital Neta, and Moshe Bar

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

2008

• The influence of contextual processes on object recognition may stem from multiple sources of information. – Object identitiesEx: an office typically contains a desk, a desk

lamp, and a computer– LocationsEx: phones are typically placed above, and not

below desks

• Context frame: object identities + locations

• Not all empirical findings are necessarily in agreement with this concept.

• Contextual associations between visual objects can be independent of spatial location representations.– Context: lack of locations

• Ex: priming effect

– Context: lack of object identities• Ex: contextual cuing

• We propose that a unified context frame encompasses both these two subtypes of contextual associations.

• A global contextual representation can provide a highly coherent and meaningful representation of the visual environment.

Three critical cortex for context frame

• inferior prefrontal cortex (IPC): semantic and conceptual tasks

• medial-temporal lobe regions (hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex [PHC]): contextual associative processing

• lateral occipital complex (LOC): object-selective regions

EXP

Task: 2 AFC decision task

Behavioral results

General discussion

• Our results demonstrate that identity-based and location-based contextual factors interact with each other during visual object recognition.