Top-Down Facilitation of Visual Object Recognition

Cortical processing required for object recognition is traditionally thought to be propagating serially along a hierarchy of visual areas that analyze increasingly complex information. Recent efforts gradually promote the involvement of top-down facilitation in cortical functions, but how such processing is initiated remains a puzzle. A specific mechanism for the activation of top-down facilitation during visual object recognition is described here. This mechanism is triggered by the rapid projection of a partially analyzed version of the input image (i.e., a blurred image) from early visual areas directly to the prefrontal cortex. The information that is activated in the prefrontal cortex as a result is backprojected to “object-related” regions in the temporal cortex to produce expectations about the most likely interpretation of the input image. This top-down process facilitates recognition by substantially limiting the number of object representations that need to be considered. The relation between top-down processes that facilitate recognition and top-down processes that exert attentional influence is discussed.

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