Activity in perirhinal and entorhinal cortex predicts perceived visual similarities among category exemplars with highest precision

  1. Kayla M Ferko
  2. Anna Blumenthal
  3. Chris B Martin
  4. Daria Proklova
  5. Alexander N Minos
  6. Lisa M Saksida
  7. Timothy J Bussey
  8. Ali R Khan
  9. Stefan Köhler  Is a corresponding author
  1. University of Western Ontario, Canada
  2. University of Laval, Canada
  3. Florida State University, United States

Abstract

Vision neuroscience has made great strides in understanding the hierarchical organization of object representations along the ventral visual stream (VVS). How VVS representations capture fine-grained visual similarities between objects that observers subjectively perceive has received limited examination so far. In the current study, we addressed this question by focusing on perceived visual similarities among subordinate exemplars of real world-categories. We hypothesized that these perceived similarities are reflected with highest fidelity in neural activity patterns downstream from inferotemporal regions, namely in perirhinal and anterolateral entorhinal cortex in the medial temporal-lobe. To address this issue with fMRI, we administered a modified 1-Back task that required discrimination between category exemplars as well as categorization. Further, we obtained observer-specific ratings of perceived visual similarities, which predicted behavioural performance during scanning. As anticipated, we found that activity patterns in perirhinal and anterolateral entorhinal cortex predicted the structure of perceived visual similarity relationships among category exemplars, including its observer-specific component, with higher precision than any other VVS region. Our findings provide new evidence that subjective aspects of object perception that rely on fine-grained visual differentiation are reflected with highest fidelity in the medial temporal lobe.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting fields. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 6,7

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Kayla M Ferko

    Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, london, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4362-7295
  2. Anna Blumenthal

    Cervo Brain Research Center, University of Laval, Quebec, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Chris B Martin

    Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahasse, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7014-4371
  4. Daria Proklova

    Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Alexander N Minos

    Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Lisa M Saksida

    Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  7. Timothy J Bussey

    Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  8. Ali R Khan

    Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0760-8647
  9. Stefan Köhler

    Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, london, Canada
    For correspondence
    stefank@uwo.ca
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1905-6453

Funding

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (366062)

  • Ali R Khan

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (366062)

  • Stefan Köhler

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

  • Kayla M Ferko

Ontario Trillium Foundation

  • Anna Blumenthal

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Lila Davachi, Columbia University, United States

Ethics

Human subjects: Human subjects: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Western Ontario (REB # 115283). Informed consent was obtained from each participant before the experiment, including consent to publish anonymized results.

Version history

  1. Preprint posted: January 21, 2021 (view preprint)
  2. Received: January 25, 2021
  3. Accepted: March 17, 2022
  4. Accepted Manuscript published: March 21, 2022 (version 1)
  5. Version of Record published: April 20, 2022 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2022, Ferko et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Kayla M Ferko
  2. Anna Blumenthal
  3. Chris B Martin
  4. Daria Proklova
  5. Alexander N Minos
  6. Lisa M Saksida
  7. Timothy J Bussey
  8. Ali R Khan
  9. Stefan Köhler
(2022)
Activity in perirhinal and entorhinal cortex predicts perceived visual similarities among category exemplars with highest precision
eLife 11:e66884.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66884

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66884

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