Abstract
Although visual processing has been mainly associated with the primate occipital/temporal cortices, the processing of sophisticated visual information in the primate parietal cortex has also been reported by a number of studies. In this talk, I will examine the range of visual stimuli that can be represented in the human parietal cortex and the nature of these representations in terms of their distractor resistance, task dependency and behavioral relevance. I will then directly compare object representation similarity between occipital/temporal and parietal cortices. Together, these results argue against a content-poor view of parietal cortexs role in attention. Instead, they suggest that parietal cortex is content-rich and capable of directly participating in goal-driven visual information representation in the brain. This view has the potential to help us understand the role of parietal cortex in other tasks such as decision-making and action, both of which demand the online processing of visual information. Perhaps one way to understand the function of parietal cortex is to view it as a global workspace where sensory information is retained, integrated, and evaluated to guide the execution of appropriate actions.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016