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Graspable foods and tools elicit similar responses in visual cortex
John Brendan Ritchie1, Spencer T Andrews1,2, Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam1,3
1The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, The National Institute of Mental Health, 10 Center Drive, Bethesda, MD 20982, United States.
Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
|September 25, 2024
Summary
Visual cortex shows similar brain activity for food and tools, suggesting representation based on how we interact with them (affordances), not just appearance. This challenges the idea of distinct food category selectivity.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Psychology
- Visual Perception
Background:
- The extrastriatal visual cortex processes complex stimuli like faces, scenes, and tools.
- Emerging evidence indicates food selectivity in the human visual cortex.
- Food shares properties with tools, such as being graspable and manipulated during actions like eating.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether food items are preferentially represented in the extrastriatal visual cortex due to shared affordance properties with tools.
- To test the hypothesis that food selectivity reflects behavioral affordances rather than a distinct category.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity.
- Behavioral experiments to assess perceived action-related properties of food and tools.
- Comparative analysis of neural responses to images of graspable food items and tools.
Main Results:
- Graspable food items and tools were perceived as similar in their action-related properties.
- Neural responses in the extrastriatal visual cortex to graspable food images mirrored those of tool stimuli in location, magnitude, and pattern.
- Findings indicate overlapping neural representations for food and tools.
Conclusions:
- Food selectivity in the visual cortex may stem from shared behavioral affordances (how objects can be used) with tools.
- This challenges the notion of a unique visual category for food, suggesting representation is linked to action and manipulation.
- The findings highlight the role of affordances in shaping neural representations of objects.
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