Content-specific activity in frontoparietal and default-mode networks during prior-guided visual perception

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Understanding how prior knowledge influences brain function is crucial for cognitive neuroscience.
• The specific impact on large-scale brain networks like the frontoparietal network (FPN) and default-mode network (DMN) is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effects of acquiring prior knowledge on neural representations in the human brain.
• To elucidate the role of the FPN and DMN in knowledge-driven perceptual processing.

Main Methods:

• Utilized ultra-high-field (7T) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture detailed brain activity.
• Analyzed neural representations in response to visual stimuli after knowledge acquisition.

Main Results:

• Prior knowledge significantly altered neural representations in the FPN and DMN.
• Neural responses became more distinct for individual images and more similar to learned priors.
• A stable hierarchical organization of neural representations was observed, with gradients in dimensionality and knowledge impact.

Conclusions:

• Prior knowledge exerts extensive and graded influences on perceptual processing across the brain.
• The FPN and DMN play key roles in integrating prior knowledge into perception.
• Cortical hierarchies exhibit distinct gradients in representational dimensionality and knowledge influence.