Abstract
At any given moment, only a fraction of the visual input may be useful to guide our thoughts and actions. Having the entire visual input available could be distracting and disruptive. To extract the most useful information at each moment, visual processing needs to be selective and adaptive. Here I will show that, compared to visual object representations in the human occipito-temporal cortex (OTC), those in the human posterior parietal cortex (PPC) are more adaptive to serve the task at hand. Specifically, attention and task alter how objects are represented in PPC, with both the differences among the objects and task determining the object representational structure in PPC and with object representations in PPC better tracking the perceived object similarity when objects are task-relevant. Similarly, while the representations of a pair of objects shown together may be predicted by the representations of each constituent object shown in isolation in OTC, this is true in PPC only when the task context is equated. In visual working memory tasks, PPC object representations have been shown to be more resilient to distraction. A recent study shows that while VWM representations of target objects in OTC are entangled with those of distractor objects, those in PPC, however, are more distractor invariant. Such a representational scheme could potentially support PPC’s resilience to distraction in VWM tasks. The adaptive nature of visual object representation in PPC thus allows PPC to play a unique and significant role in supporting goal-directed visual information processing in the primate brain.