TY - JOUR T1 - Modality-Independent Coding Of Concepts In Prefrontal Cortex JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/142562 SP - 142562 AU - Yaelan Jung AU - Bart Larsen AU - Dirk B. Walther Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/26/142562.abstract N2 - Natural environments convey information through multiple sensory modalities, all of which contribute to our percepts. Although it has been shown that neural representations of visual content can be decoded from the visual cortex, it remains unclear where and how humans represent perceptual information at a conceptual level, not limited to a specific sensory modality. To address this question, we investigated how categories of scene images and sounds are represented in several brain regions. We found that both visual and auditory scene categories can be decoded not only from modality-specific areas, but also from several brain regions in the temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortex. Intriguingly, only in the prefrontal cortex, but not in any other regions, categories of scene images and sounds appear to be represented in similar activation patterns, suggesting that scene representations in prefrontal cortex are modality-independent. Furthermore, the error patterns of neural decoders indicate that the category-specific neural activity patterns in the middle and superior frontal gyri are tightly linked to categorization behavior. Our findings suggest that complex visual information is represented at a conceptual level in prefrontal cortex, regardless of the sensory modality of the stimulus. ER -