Dawn Finzi

Abstract Reading, face recognition, and navigation are supported by visuospatial computations in category-selective regions across ventral, lateral, and dorsal visual streams. However, the nature of visuospatial computations across streams and their development in adolescence remain unknown. Using fMRI and population receptive field (pRF) modeling in adolescents and adults, we estimate pRFs in high-level visual cortex and determine their development.

Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex. J. Physiol. 1962; 160: 106-154https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.1962.sp006837 Humphries C. Liebenthal E. Binder J.R. Tonotopic organization of human auditory cortex. Neuroimage. 2010; 50: 1202-1211https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.01.046 Harvey B.M. Klein B.P. Petridou N. Dumoulin S.O. Topographic representation of numerosity in the human parietal cortex. Science.

Abstract Human visual cortex is organized into dorsal, lateral, and ventral streams. A long-standing hypothesis is that the functional organization into streams emerged to support distinct visual behaviors. Here, we use a neural network-based computational model and a massive fMRI dataset to test how visual streams emerge. We find that models trained for stream-specific visual behaviors poorly capture neural responses and organization.