Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

/pdf/stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-1wqoykisq0.pdf

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

When natural scenes are viewed, a multitude of objects that are stable in their environments are brought in and out of view by eye movements. The posterior parietal cortex is crucial for the analysis of space, visual attention and movement 1 . Neurons in one of its subdivisions, the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), have visual responses to stimuli appearing abruptly at particular retinal locations (their receptive fields)2. We have tested the responses of LIP neurons to stimuli that entered their receptive field by saccades. Neurons had little or no response to stimuli brought into their receptive field by saccades, unless the stimuli were behaviourally significant. We established behavioural significance in two ways: either by making a stable stimulus task-relevant, or by taking advantage of the attentional attraction of an abruptly appearing stimulus. Our results show that under ordinary circumstances the entire visual world is only weakly represented in LIP. The visual representation in LIP is sparse, with only the most salient or behaviourally relevant objects being strongly represented.

The representation of visual salience in monkey parietal cortex

https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/doc/papers/Stephan_NeuroImage_49_3099_2010.pdf

Ten simple rules for dynamic causal modeling.

https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/kriegeskortekievit_representational-geometry_TiCS2013.pdf

Representational geometry: integrating cognition, computation, and the brain

Face perception elicits activation within a distributed cortical network in the human brain. The network includes visual ("core") regions, as well as limbic and prefrontal ("extended") regions, which process invariant facial features and changeable aspects of faces, respectively. We used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Dynamic Causal Modeling to investigate effective connectivity and functional organization between and within the core and the extended systems. We predicted a ventral rather than dorsal connection between the core and the extended systems during face viewing and tested whether valence and fame would alter functional coupling within the network. We found that the core system is hierarchically organized in a predominantly feed-forward fashion, and that the fusiform gyrus (FG) exerts the dominant influence on the extended system. Moreover, emotional faces increased the coupling between the FG and the amygdala, whereas famous faces increased the coupling between the FG and the orbitofrontal cortex. Our results demonstrate content-specific dynamic alterations in the functional coupling between visual-limbic and visual-prefrontal face-responsive pathways.

/pdf/effective-connectivity-within-the-distributed-cortical-35iw3aialh.pdf

Effective Connectivity within the Distributed Cortical Network for Face Perception

To what extent do the brain regions implicated in semantic processing contribute to the representation of amodal conceptual content rather than modality-specific mechanisms or mechanisms of semantic access and manipulation? Here, we propose that a brain region can be considered to represent amodal conceptual object knowledge if it is supramodal and plays a role in distinguishing among the conceptual representations of different objects. In an fMRI study, human participants made category typicality judgments about pictured objects or their names drawn from five different categories. Crossmodal multivariate pattern analysis revealed a network of six left-lateralized regions largely outside of category-selective visual cortex that showed a supramodal representation of object categories. These were located in the posterior middle/inferior temporal gyrus (pMTG/ITG), angular gyrus, ventral temporal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus (PC), and lateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Representational similarity analysis within these regions determined that the similarity between category-specific patterns of neural activity in the pMTG/ITG and the PC was consistent with the semantic similarity between these categories. This finding supports the PC and pMTG/ITG as candidate regions for the amodal representation of the conceptual properties of objects.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/33/25/10552.full.pdf

Brain Regions That Represent Amodal Conceptual Knowledge

In order to recognize the identity of a face we need to distinguish very similar images (specificity) while also generalizing identity information across image transformations such as changes in orientation (tolerance). Recent studies investigated the representation of individual faces in the brain, but it remains unclear whether the human brain regions that were found encode representations of individual images (specificity) or face identity (specificity plus tolerance). In the present article, we use multivoxel pattern analysis in the human ventral stream to investigate the representation of face identity across rotations in depth, a kind of transformation in which no point in the face image remains unchanged. The results reveal representations of face identity that are tolerant to rotations in depth in occipitotemporal cortex and in anterior temporal cortex, even when the similarity between mirror symmetrical views cannot be used to achieve tolerance. Converging evidence from different analysis techniques shows that the right anterior temporal lobe encodes a comparable amount of identity information to occipitotemporal regions, but this information is encoded over a smaller extent of cortex.

/pdf/decoding-representations-of-face-identity-that-are-tolerant-1ohwl6w43x.pdf

Decoding Representations of Face Identity That are Tolerant to Rotation

The role of attention in multisensory integration (MI) is presently uncertain, with some studies supporting an automatic, pre-attentive process and others suggesting possible modulation through selective attention. The goal of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate the role of spatial attention on the processing of congruent audiovisual speech stimuli (here indexing MI). Subjects were presented with two simultaneous visual streams (speaking lips in the left and right visual hemifields) plus a single central audio stream (spoken words). In the selective attention conditions, the auditory stream was congruent with one of the two visual streams. Subjects attended to either the congruent or the incongruent visual stream, allowing the comparison of brain activity for attended vs. unattended MI while the amount of multisensory information in the environment and the overall attentional requirements were held constant. Meridian mapping and a lateralized 'speaking-lips' localizer were used to identify early visual areas and to localize regions responding to contralateral visual stimulations. Results showed that attention to the congruent audiovisual stimulus resulted in increased activation in the superior temporal sulcus, striate and extrastriate retinotopic visual cortex, and superior colliculus. These findings demonstrate that audiovisual integration and spatial attention jointly interact to influence activity in an extensive network of brain areas, including associative regions, early sensory-specific visual cortex and subcortical structures that together contribute to the perception of a fused audiovisual percept.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2009.06688.x

Spatial attention can modulate audiovisual integration at multiple cortical and subcortical sites.

http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~alumit/BRB_Art07.pdf

Scott L. Fairhall

Papers

Effective Connectivity within the Distributed Cortical Network for Face Perception

Brain Regions That Represent Amodal Conceptual Knowledge

Decoding Representations of Face Identity That are Tolerant to Rotation

Spatial attention can modulate audiovisual integration at multiple cortical and subcortical sites.

Perception, memory and aesthetics of indeterminate art.