Category learning biases sensory representations in visual cortex.

Abstract

Categorization allows organisms to generalize existing knowledge to novel stimuli and to discriminate between physically similar yet conceptually different stimuli. Humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents can readily learn arbitrary categories defined by low-level visual features, and learning distorts perceptual sensitivity for category-defining features such that differences between physically similar yet categorically distinct exemplars are enhanced while differences between equally similar but categorically identical stimuli are reduced. We report a basis for these distortions in human occipitoparietal cortex. In three experiments, we used an inverted encoding model to recover population-level representations of stimuli from multivoxel and multi-electrode patterns of human brain activity while human participants (both sexes) classified continuous stimulus sets into discrete groups. In each experiment, reconstructed representations of to-be-categorized stimuli were systematically biased towards the center of the appropriate category. These biases were largest for exemplars near a category boundary, predicted participants overt category judgments, emerged shortly after stimulus onset, and could not be explained by mechanisms of response selection or motor preparation. Collectively, our findings suggest that category learning can influence processing at the earliest stages of cortical visual processing. Significance StatementCategory learning enhances perceptual sensitivity for physically similar yet categorically different stimuli. We report a possible mechanism for these distortions in human occipitoparietal cortex.. In three experiments, we used an inverted encoding model to recover population-level representations of stimuli from multivariate patterns in occipitoparietal cortex while participants categorized sets of continuous stimuli into discrete groups. The recovered representations were systematically biased by category membership, with larger biases for exemplars adjacent to a category boundary. These results suggest that mechanisms of categorization shape information processing at the earliest stages of the visual system.