Exploring spatio-temporal neural dynamics of the human visual cortex

The human visual cortex is organized in a hierarchical manner. Although a significant body of evidence has been accumulated in support of this hypothesis, specific details regarding the spatial and temporal information flow remain open. Here we present detailed spatio-temporal correlation profiles of neural activity with low-level and high-level features derived from a “deep” (8-layer) neural network pre-trained for object recognition. These correlation profiles indicate an early-to-late shift from low-level features to high-level features and from low-level regions to higher-level regions along the visual hierarchy, consistent with feedforward information flow. To refine our understanding of information flow, we computed three sets of features from the low-and high-level features provided by the neural network: object-category-relevant low-level features (the common components between low-level and high-level features), low-level features roughly orthogonal to high-level features (the residual Layer 1 features), and unique high-level features that were roughly orthogonal to low-level features (the residual Layer 7 features). Contrasting the correlation effects of the common components and the residual Layer 1 features, we observed that the early visual cortex exhibits a similar amount of correlation with the two feature sets early in time (60 to 120 ms), but in a later time window, the early visual cortex exhibits a higher and longer correlation effect with the common components/low-level task-relevant features as compared to the low-level residual features—an effect unlikely to arise from purely feedforward information flow. Overall, our results indicate that non-feedforward processes, for example, top-down influences from mental representations of categories, may facilitate differentiation between these two types of low-level features within the early visual cortex.