Neural mechanisms of rapid natural scene categorization in human visual cortex

The visual system has an extraordinary capability to extract categorical information from complex natural scenes. For example, subjects are able to rapidly detect the presence of object categories such as animals or vehicles in novel scenes that are presented very briefly1,2. This is even true when subjects do not pay attention to the scenes and simultaneously perform an unrelated attentionally demanding task3, a stark contrast to the capacity limitations predicted by most theories of visual attention4,5.

Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging and an object categorization task, in which subjects detected the presence of people or cars in briefly presented natural scenes, to provide a neural basis for rapid natural scene categorization in visual cortex. The pattern of neural activity in object-selective cortex evoked by the natural scenes contained information regarding the target category, even in scenes that were task-irrelevant and presented outside the focus of spatial attention.

These findings suggest that the rapid detection of categorical information in natural scenes is mediated through a category-specific biasing mechanism in object-selective cortex that operates in parallel across the visual field and biases information processing in favour of objects belonging to the target object category.