One of the most remarkable human abilities is that of recognizing complex objects in a fraction of a second. A question that is central to our understanding of object recognition is how this knowledge is represented and organized in the brain such that we can use it so efficiently. Although we have uncovered the dimensions that underlie the topographical organization of sensory cortices, we have not come up with a satisfactory set of dimensions that can be the principle of functional organization within object-selective cortex. In fact, this is one of the hard problems in cognitive neuroscience because it is not obvious what the dimensions that drive this organization are. In this project, we will focus on uncovering these principles by examining, in innovative ways, how object knowledge is organized in the brain, and how cognitive relationships between objects and object properties are mapped.
