A key aim of our perception is to recognise objects and assign them to different categories – for example, whether this object in front of us is a dog and whether a dog belongs to the category of animals. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Justus Liebig University Giessen in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health in the USA have now been able to show that this picture is incomplete. In a recent study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, they write that brain activity when seeing objects can be much better explained by a variety of behaviourally relevant dimensions.
Leipzig, September 09th, 2024. Die Wahrnehmung verschiedener Objekte, Menschen und Tiere um uns herum mit dem Auge erfassen, sehen wir als normal an. Bislang galt die Auffassung der Forschung, das eine Repräsentation, also das erlernte betrachten eines Objektes wie ein Hund, Katze oder Kuh von uns einer Kategorie zugeordnet wird, wie bsw. Tiere.
Forschende vom Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften in Leipzig und der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in Zusammenarbeit mit den National Institutes of Health in den USA konnte nun zeigen, dass dieses Bild unvollständig ist. In einer aktuellen Studie im Fachjournal Nature Human Behaviour schreiben sie, dass sich die Hirnaktivität beim Sehen von Objekten viel besser mit einer Vielzahl verhaltensrelevanter Dimensionen erklären lässt.
‘Our results have shown that although recognition and categorisation are important goals of our vision, they are by no means the only ones,’ says last author Martin Hebart. ‘In fact, we find behaviourally relevant signals at all processing stages in the visual system. We were able to deduce this from the analysis of the behaviourally relevant dimensions we discovered.’ The researchers had previously used a computer model to identify 66 object dimensions from the behavioural data of over 12,000 study participants. These dimensions not only explain categorisation, i.e. whether a dog is an animal, but also cover other characteristics, such as colours and shapes, as well as gradual values, for example how typical a dog is of an animal. Martin Hebart: ‘This enabled us to explain much better how our brain enables us to perceive the objects in our environment and understand their meaning.’
Martin Hebart adds: ‘Our work reveals a multidimensional framework that is consistent with the rich and diverse behavioural relevance of objects. This ultimately explains our broad range of human behaviours better than a pure categorisation approach, which in turn is crucial for understanding how we perceive and interact with our visual world in a meaningful way.’
Originalpublication:
Oliver Contier, Chris I. Baker, Martin N. Hebart
‚Distributed representations of behaviour-derived object dimensions in the human visual system‘
In: Nature Human Behavior (2024)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01980-y
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