Object Metrics

The importance of understanding the organization of conceptual knowledge and object recognition becomes apparent when dealing with patients suffering from category-specific knowledge disorders such as relatively selective knowledge impairments for animate objects (e.g. animals), or relatively selective impairments for manmade, inanimate objects (e.g. tools). When looking at brain damaged patients in more detail, it turns out that conceptual knowledge is organized according to domain-specific constraints which is supported by results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy subjects. We know that particular brain areas are activated by particular object classes, such as tools, faces, body parts and places. However, little is known about the neural response preferences and cortical organizational principles that form the brain’s detailed representation of these objects. This is especially true when compared to our understanding of the neural representation of sensory information. Sensory cortices hold topo-graphically ordered maps that directly reflect the organization of our sensory organs, such as the retina (retinotopic visual field maps), the cochlea (auditory tonotopic maps) or the skin (somatotopic maps). Are similar organizational principles also common to object-selective cortex? In this project, we aim at investigating topographic organization within object-selective areas using fMRI for understanding the neural principles that shape the organization of conceptual knowledge. We will do so by explore the organizational principles within a domain of knowledge – that of manmade objects. We will model the network of topographic organization within object-selective areas using methods based on graph theory to get more insights into network structure and network shaping.