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Occipitotemporal Representations Reflect Individual Differences in Conceptual Knowledge

View ORCID ProfileK. Braunlich, B. C. Love
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/264895
K. Braunlich
aDepartment of Psychology, University College London. 26 Bedford Way, London, UK
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  • For correspondence: k.braunlich@ucl.ac.uk
B. C. Love
aDepartment of Psychology, University College London. 26 Bedford Way, London, UK
bThe Alan Turing Institute. 96 Euston Rd., London, UK
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Abstract

Through selective attention, decision-makers can learn to ignore behaviorally-irrelevant stimulus dimensions. This can improve learning and increase the perceptual discriminability of relevant stimulus information. To account for this effect, popular contemporary cognitive models of categorization typically include of attentional parameters, which provide information about the importance of each stimulus dimension in decision-making. The effect of these parameters on psychological representation is often described geometrically, such that perceptual differences over relevant psychological dimensions are accentuated (or stretched), and differences over irrelevant dimensions are down-weighted (or compressed). In sensory and association cortex, representations of stimulus features are known to covary with their behavioral relevance. Although this implies that neural representational space might closely resemble that hypothesized by formal categorization theory, to date, attentional effects in the brain have been demonstrated through powerful experimental manipulations (e.g., contrasts between relevant and irrelevant features). This approach sidesteps the role of idiosyncratic conceptual knowledge in guiding attention to useful information sources. To bridge this divide, we used formal categorization models, which were fit to behavioral data, to make inferences about the concepts and strategies used by individual participants during decision-making. We found that when greater attentional weight was devoted to a particular visual feature (e.g., “color”), its value (e.g., “red”) was more accurately decoded from occipitotemporal cortex. We additionally found that this effect was sufficiently sensitive to reflect individual differences in conceptual knowledge. The results indicate that occipitotemporal stimulus representations are embedded within a space closely resembling that proposed by classic categorization models.

Acknowledgments

We thank the authors of the original studies for sharing their data. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1P01HD080679, Leverhulme Trust grant RPG-2014-075 and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award WT106931MA to BCL.

Footnotes

  • Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 02, 2018.
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Occipitotemporal Representations Reflect Individual Differences in Conceptual Knowledge
K. Braunlich, B. C. Love
bioRxiv 264895; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/264895
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Occipitotemporal Representations Reflect Individual Differences in Conceptual Knowledge
K. Braunlich, B. C. Love
bioRxiv 264895; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/264895

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