Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

How the brain constructs meaning across extended contexts remains poorly understood. While neural responses to words and sentences are well characterized, much less is known about the brain mechanisms supporting narrative comprehension. Sentence-level studies suggest that neural activation increases as word meanings are integrated into sentence meaning. At the discourse level, theories propose that narratives depend on situation models, possibly engaging networks beyond core language regions, including the default mode network. Because narrative comprehension unfolds over longer timescales, processing time may be a bottleneck. In this MEG study, we tested how representation size and presentation rate shape neural responses by varying linguistic structure (words, sentences, stories) and the speed of visual text in 1-4-word chunks. We found an early bilateral story effect in visual cortex, followed by a spatiotemporal progression of activity along the temporal lobes that culminated in a three-way contrast among word lists, sentence lists, and stories. Faster presentation altered this pattern: the left-lateralized story effect disappeared, and the right-lateralized effect became more spatially restricted. Under Fast presentation, significant effects were limited to left lateral language cortex distinguishing coherent inputs from word lists, and to two right-hemisphere story effects in extended language regions. We also observed a context effect in the Slow Story condition, with neural responses remaining constant as the narrative unfolded while they increased in the SentenceList and WordList conditions. This effect was absent under Fast presentation, suggesting story-specific comprehension that is temporally constrained. Together, the findings identify temporal constraints as a key determinant of the neural signatures of narrative processing.

The natural environment is spatiotemporally structured, and the brain exploits this regularity to predict and prepare for upcoming sensory stimuli. Such predictive processing is thought to increase neural efficiency by reducing metabolic expenditure and altering the fidelity with which newly encountered stimuli are encoded. Competing theoretical frameworks propose this is achieved either through sharpening, whereby expected events are encoded more precisely, or dampening, whereby expected events are suppressed and encoded less precisely. Despite clear, opposing predictions, evidence in humans for each account remains mixed due to methodological and analytical inconsistencies. Here we addressed these issues using probabilistic visual paradigm combined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). We used population receptive field (pRF) mapping of fMRI data and inverted encoding of EEG data to compare the fidelity and timecourse of activity in visual areas in response to expected, unexpected, and random stimuli. Both methods produced a consistent pattern of results. Post hoc analysis of EEG data revealed that the apparent effect of expectancy was better explained by local spatiotemporal stimulus properties than the global expectancy manipulation. Although this pattern resembled sensory adaptation, it was more consistent with an expectation of temporal stability combined with dampening, in which both the aggregate response to expected features and their representational fidelity are suppressed. Taken together, our findings suggest that predictive processing may operate through dampening, with ecological advantages for high-fidelity encoding of unexpected sensory events.

Across contemplative traditions, deeper states of meditation are described as states of heightened clarity, vividness, and stillness of mind, yet what this clarity corresponds to in the brain has remained difficult to specify. The functional signal-to-noise ratio (f-SNR) framework frames mental clarity as a measurable property of neural signals: the degree to which brain activity tracks the causes of sensory signals rather than endogenous, irrelevant fluctuations. It predicts that deepening meditation should raise f-SNR, expressing sensory events more faithfully in neural signals against ongoing background activity. We tested this prediction across different levels of meditative depth. Twenty-nine experienced Vipassana practitioners meditated while auditory tones were presented, periodically reporting their depth of meditation. f-SNR was quantified from event-related potentials (ERPs) in a fronto-central P3 window and from single-trial decodability of auditory tone-evoked activity against no-tone background EEG. High-depth states were associated with greater ERP signal-to-noise ratio, stronger single-trial signal consistency, and improved decodability of auditory tones. These results suggest that meditative depth is expressed in the reproducibility and stimulus-background separability of sensory responses, consistent with deep meditation enhancing the brain's functional signal-to-noise ratio by improving the clarity of sensory signals and reducing endogenous noise.

Sentence comprehension requires the incremental construction of syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. Prior neural work (Nelson et al., 2017) identified key neural events at major phrase boundaries during sentence comprehension. To investigate a behavioral correlation of these processes, we used self-paced reading to examine the impact of syntactic phase boundaries, semantic congruence, and sentence structure on sentence processing. Participants read object-relative, subject-relative, and canonical control sentences one word at a time and a subsequent comprehension task. Reading times were analyzed relative to phrase boundaries, node-closing operations, and semantic congruence. Object-relative sentences produced the greatest processing difficulty, demonstrated by increased reading times and decreased comprehension accuracy. Reading times peaked at the phrase boundaries, indicating that processing costs are tied to constituent completion rather than individual lexical categories. Reading times also increased with the number of syntactic constituents completed at a phrase boundary. Agent-patient semantic congruence produced its largest effects in object-relative sentences, suggesting that semantic information interacts with syntactic computations when processing demands are greatest. These findings demonstrate that self-paced reading is sensitive to the incremental processing associated with syntactic constituent completion. Processing costs are tied more closely to phrase completion than to individual lexical categories, scale with the amount of syntactic structure completed at a boundary and interact with agent-patient semantic interpretation during object-relative sentence comprehension. Together, these findings support a view of sentence comprehension in which syntactic structure building and semantic interpretation proceed incrementally and interact continuously throughout online language processing.

Human long-term memory for visual scenes is remarkably robust, yet the neural mechanisms supporting memory encoding and retrieval remain poorly understood when both processes must operate at the same time. For instance, this might happen when we encounter a familiar place while simultaneously forming new memories of this encounter. We investigated electrophysiological correlates of visual recognition memory using a continuous recognition task (CRT), in which participants judged a continuous stream of scene photographs as previously seen or new, such that encoding and retrieval occurred in parallel on every trial. To make recognition particularly demanding, stimuli were drawn from only four scene categories. Thirty-one participants performed the task while EEG was recorded, and we analyzed canonical ERP markers of retrieval (mid-frontal FN400, 300-550 ms; late parietal effect, LPE, 550-800 ms) and encoding (subsequent memory effect, SME) as a function of stimulus repetition and lag between consecutive presentations. FN400 showed robust old/new effects for both repetitions, whereas LPE differences emerged only at the second repetition. While FN400 amplitude was insensitive to lag, LPE amplitude decreased systematically with increasing lag, mirroring the behavioral pattern of declining accuracy and slower responses. A significant SME emerged selectively for images subsequently recognized on both repetitions, indicating that the SME in continuous recognition is specific for the most robustly encoded items and reflects the strength of encoding. Together, these findings show that canonical ERP markers of recognition memory are preserved even when encoding and retrieval operate concurrently, but their expression depends on how often and how recently an item has previously been encoded - parameters that can be flexibly manipulated within the CRT. This demonstrates that the CRT is sensitive to fine-grained temporal dynamics of memory formation and retrieval that could be missed under standard single-repetition designs.

The perception of timing has been investigated across short and long timescales, with the latter usually underrepresented. Previous accounts of supra-second timing have often emphasised dedicated neural signals, yet whether timing performance over longer durations reflects specialised temporal mechanisms or domain-general neural excitability remains unclear. We examined this question in an interval reproduction task (2 to 4 s) using EEG, decomposing neural activity into oscillatory (alpha, theta) and aperiodic components and relating both to behavioural performance. At the neural level, separate analyses were performed on the interval encoding epoch and the following delay period. Time-resolved analyses revealed a coordinated decrease in posterior alpha power and aperiodic offset during interval encoding. In contrast, interval duration did not produce consistent modulation of oscillatory or aperiodic activity during the delay period, providing limited support for a workload-based account of time duration. Across participants, higher baseline alpha power and aperiodic offset were associated with better timing accuracy, whereas trial-by-trial fluctuations in aperiodic activity, and to a lesser extent alpha power, predicted single-trial reproductions. The results suggest that temporal behaviour in the supra-second range is shaped by domain-general neural activity sustaining goal-directed task engagement, with oscillatory and aperiodic dynamics serving as complementary indices of this broader excitability state.

Previous research on the brain correlates of working memory using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) have shown that neural activity related to information currently needed to respond on a test is considered to be in the focus of attention (FoA). An ongoing controversy pertains to the neural representation of information in working memory that is not needed for the upcoming test but possibly for a subsequent one, which is considered to reside in an activated portion of long-term memory (aLTM). The key theoretical issue regarding aLTM is whether it corresponds solely to an activity-silent neural state. Here, by using a retrospective cuing task in which two arrays of stimuli from different categories were presented in succession on the same trial, and a pattern classifier trained on the first-presented category during the presentation of the second, we provide evidence that aLTM is associated with an active neural state. Specifically, the aLTM effect was demonstrated to be dissociable in direction from that related to the FoA, there was considerable overlap between brain regions representing information in a stronger form in the FoA and a weaker form in aLTM, and the two states appeared to be differentially subject to flexible cognitive control versus natural decay.

Eye blinks are among the largest physiological artefacts in electroencephalography and are typically removed from neural recordings. Yet their timing may carry information about cognition. Here, we asked whether the temporal distribution of spontaneous blinks across trials provides a time-resolved behavioural signature of internal attentional focusing in working memory. In Experiment 1, blink-locked EEG analyses showed that blink timing was aligned with neural activity reflecting attentional focusing on a relevant internal representation. In Experiment 2, participants remembered the same visual information across conditions, but the relevant item was revealed either early, by a cue before report, or later, at report. Blink-frequency profiles shifted accordingly, increasing after the cue when selection was possible early and after the probe when selection was delayed. Post-cue blinks in the early-selection condition were also associated with better memory performance. Thus, more generally, spontaneous blinks provide an unobtrusive chronometric signal for tracking latent cognitive processing.

Audiovisual semantic matching can be achieved using either written words or pictures, yet whether these formats engage shared semantic matching representations with similar temporal dynamics remains unclear. We recorded electroencephalography from 27 participants while they performed audiovisual semantic matching tasks in which spoken words were paired with either written words or pictures. Stimuli included both natural and man-made objects. Time-resolved multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA or decoding), cross-decoding, and temporal generalization analyses were used to characterize the temporal dynamics of semantic processing. Reliable decoding of matching versus mismatching judgments emerged in both word and picture conditions. Decoding onset that significant above chance level occurred earlier for written words than for pictures and cross-decoding analyses revealed successful generalization between word and picture formats. Temporal generalization analyses further demonstrated distinct representational dynamics across formats, with word processing characterized by predominantly time-specific neural representations and picture processing showing more sustained and temporally stable representations. In addition, matching-related discrimination emerged earlier for natural objects than for man-made objects across both formats. The results suggest that speech-word matching shows earlier neural evidence of audiovisual alignment than speech-picture matching, potentially reflecting differences in how auditory linguistic input is integrated with visual information across representational formats.

Music enjoyment and familiarity are closely related but often confounded in studies of neural music processing. Here, we investigated their distinct contributions to cortical oscillatory activity and neural tracking of music using electroencephalography (EEG). Thirty-two participants listened to self-selected all-time favourite songs, recent favourite songs, and tempo-matched songs from disliked genres. This novel paradigm dissociated familiarity from enjoyment by including highly enjoyed songs that differed in familiarity. Spectral power and cortical tracking (using Mutual Information) were analysed using linear mixed-effects models with enjoyment and familiarity ratings. Familiarity was associated with increased left-frontal alpha power, whereas enjoyment predicted increased theta and beta power, demonstrating distinct oscillatory signatures for these dimensions. An interaction revealed that the positive relationship between enjoyment and theta power was strongest for highly familiar music. Cortical tracking analyses showed that greater enjoyment was associated with reduced delta-band tracking, with a significant interaction indicating that this negative relationship was present for highly familiar songs but not for less familiar songs. These findings indicate that enjoyment and familiarity differentially shape neural responses to music and highlight the importance of modelling both factors to disentangle their distinct effects on neural activity during music listening.

Visuospatial attention enables the selective allocation of cognitive resources to relevant stimuli. A well-established neural signature of attentional shifts is the lateralised modulation of occipito-parietal alpha power, with decreases over the hemisphere contralateral to the attended location and increases over the ipsilateral hemisphere. However, growing evidence suggests that multiple oscillatory mechanisms contribute to attentional deployment, including beta-band activity. A key unresolved question that remains is whether the same neural rhythms support the deployment of attention and the perceptual decisions that follow. Here, we recorded EEG in 26 participants (22 females) during covert visuospatial orienting and investigated how alpha- and beta-band dynamics relate to behavioural measures, namely perceptual sensitivity (d') and decision criterion (c), and whether attended location could be preferentially decoded from alpha- or beta-band activity. We found that pre-target beta phase significantly predicted decision criterion at earlier pre-target intervals, whereas perceptual sensitivity was predicted closer to target onset, suggesting that beta is related to both sensory gain and the perceptual decision. In contrast, decoding analyses revealed that attended location was most strongly discriminable from alpha-band activity, as confirmed by time-frequency analysis of decoding accuracy. Together, these findings suggest a functional dissociation between oscillatory mechanisms supporting attentional orienting and perceptual decision-making. Whereas alpha-band activity primarily reflects the allocation of attention, beta-band dynamics predict trial-by-trial variability in perceptual decisions.

During active vision, the brain must coordinate where to move the eyes with predictions about upcoming sensory input. Before each saccade, perception is enhanced at the upcoming fixation location, but whether this enhancement depends on expectations about target features remains unknown. Here, participants prepared a saccade to a cued location while reporting the presence and orientation of a brief visual target that appeared either at the saccade goal or at the opposite location. Feature expectation was manipulated across blocks by varying the probability of the two target orientations. Perceptual sensitivity (d') increased when targets were presented at the saccade goal, consistent with presaccadic enhancement, and was also higher for less expected features. However, these effects were independent: feature probability did not alter the magnitude of presaccadic enhancement. Moreover, presaccadic enhancement increased near saccade onset, whereas the advantage for less expected features weakened as movement onset approached. Saccade latency revealed a contrasting pattern. Visual targets presented at the saccade goal delayed movement initiation. This delay depended on feature probability, with longer latencies for unexpected than for expected features only when saccades were directed towards the target. This location-specific effect persisted after accounting for perceptual report, and the latency cost for unexpected features was reproduced in a follow-up experiment. Together, these findings show that feature probability enhanced sensitivity to unexpected information independently of presaccadic enhancement, while selectively delaying saccade initiation towards targets with unexpected features. This dissociation suggests that feature expectation modulates perception and action through functionally distinct forms of visual processing.

Our visual environment can be parsed into objects and scenes, a distinction that is reflected in the organization of the human visual cortex. Previous research has shown that object and scene perception nevertheless closely interact, such that scenes influence object perception and objects influence scene perception. It remains unclear, however, whether and how objects that are not inherently diagnostic of their surroundings aid the recognition of poorly visible scenes (e.g., a person standing in a dark living room). Here, in three behavioral experiments, we show that participants made more accurate indoor/outdoor judgments when degraded scene photographs were presented together with an object than when the scene or the object was shown alone, even though the same object categories appeared in indoor and outdoor scenes. This object-driven benefit vanished once scene structure was removed through phase scrambling and was reduced when objects appeared in physically inconsistent locations within the scenes. These results suggest that objects in consistent locations (e.g., a person standing on a floor) disambiguate scene layout. Finally, in a pre-registered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study (N = 48), we provide causal evidence that the object-selective lateral occipital cortex (LOC) supports scene categorization when scene layout is disambiguated by within-scene objects. Stimulation of the LOC, particularly at 260-300 ms after stimulus onset, selectively disrupted object-based scene recognition. Together, these findings demonstrate that objects facilitate the read-out of the surrounding space in service of efficient scene recognition. Significance StatementUnderstanding how scene and object processing interact for efficient recognition is a key question in natural vision. Research has long emphasized how surrounding scenes help us identify objects, yet the reverse - how objects shape the perception of scenes - has received little attention. In the dark, does a glimpse of a floating boat tell us we are looking at a lake? In this study we demonstrate that a single object helps people recognize hardly visible scenes. This benefit required intact scene structure and depended on where the object appeared in the scene. In addition, object selective visual cortex was causally related to this benefit. Together, these findings show that objects visual appearance can be used to better understand our surroundings.

Filling-in occurs during the perceptual disappearance of a blank figure presented on a textured background. Current models of perceptual filling-in are based on a two-stage model where the figure boundary weakens after a period of adaptation, followed by the spreading of the background representation into the region representing the figure. This suggests a competition between figure boundary and background representations whereby filling-in is facilitated by a weaker boundary representation and a stronger background representation. Here, we test this interpretation, by using the oblique effect and surround-modulation suppression, which are functional properties of early visual cortex that modulate the expected strengths of the responses to the background texture and to the figure boundary. In a sample of N=58 participants, we found more filling-in with background textures of cardinal compared to oblique orientations (earlier onset time, with more and longer episodes of filling-in per trial), in line with a known, stronger neuronal response for cardinal than for oblique orientation in early visual cortex. We found more filling-in when the main axis of the rectangular figure was iso-oriented rather than cross-oriented with the background texture (more and longer episodes of filling-in per trial, but no change in onset time), in line with a lower response to oriented stimuli when surrounded by iso-oriented flankers compared to cross-oriented flankers. Overall, our results support the two-stage model and suggest the involvement of early visual cortical areas characterized by the oblique effect and orientation- tuned surround-suppression.

Language production requires the coordination of multiple cognitive processes. The ability to anticipate and override a habitual response in favor of a contextually-appropriate response are key subprocesses of cognitive control which enable speakers to communicate effectively. Word retrieval involves the co-activation of semantically related alternatives from which the speaker must select the appropriate target representation. Although cognitive control mechanisms have been proposed to contribute to resolving semantic interference during language production, the nature of these control processes remain unclear. Studies investigating the temporal dynamics of cognitive control during decision making tasks have led to a distinction between two operating processes: proactive control, initiated prior to the occurrence of conflict, and reactive control recruited after conflict is detected. We investigated the roles of proactive and reactive control in resolving interference between competing linguistic representations during word retrieval. We analyzed congruency sequence effects combined with delta-plot distributional analyses to dissociate potential adjustments in proactive versus reactive cognitive control in a picture-naming task manipulating semantic context compared to a minimally-linguistic Stroop-like paradigm. Reaction time distributional properties following semantically related trials revealed the engagement of proactive control in semantic interference resolution during word retrieval in the PWI task. In contrast, reactive inhibitory control was engaged in resolving semantic interference following low conflict trials. This distinction was not present in the minimally-linguistic task, which did not appear to engage adaptive control to the same extent. These findings demonstrate that both proactive and reactive cognitive control mechanisms contribute to language production, and are engaged dynamically, adjusting trial-by-trial to resolve semantic interference during word retrieval. In addition, our study provides important insight into the comparison of language with other cognitive domains and positions linguistic paradigms as being instrumental in the study of cognitive control dynamics.

Speech comprehension in noisy environments often requires cognitive effort, but listeners may disengage when comprehension becomes impossible. Eye movements have recently emerged as a promising new measure of listening effort, but it remains unclear whether eye movements are sensitive to the full effort profile across easy, difficult, and impossible speech comprehension. Across four experiments, participants listened to sentences at easy, difficult, and impossible levels of multi-talker background babble while pupil size and eye movements were recorded. Pupil size generally followed the expected inverted u-shaped effort profile: low for easy speech, maximal for difficult but still intelligible speech and lower again for impossible speech, although this pattern partly reflected sustained, condition-specific differences and not only sentence-evoked responses. Gaze dispersion - measuring the spread of eye movements - decreased with high temporal selectivity during difficult relative to easy and impossible speech, indicating reduced eye movements during active, effortful listening. However, gaze dispersion was also lower, but less temporally selective, during impossible compared to easy listening, especially in non-baseline-corrected analyses, suggesting that reduced eye movements do not index listening effort uniquely. Instead, eye movements appear to reflect both attentional engagement during difficult listening and disengagement or inward attention when meaningful listening is no longer possible. These findings indicate that pupil size and eye movements provide complementary indices of listening-related cognition, and highlight the integration of listening, cognition, and motor systems.

Post-encoding sleep plays an essential role in episodic memory consolidation. Much of the existing literature on sleep and memory relies on deprivation paradigms or laboratory-controlled sleep. Relatively few studies have examined how naturalistic post-encoding sleep relates to memory retrieval and its supporting neural activity, or whether age-related impairments in this sleep are linked to those in episodic memory. In the present study, we used actigraphy and electroencephalography to examine how post-encoding sleep quality relates to context memory performance and retrieval-related ERPs supporting performance in younger and older adults. Participants encoded object-scene pairs and were tested on matching and mismatching pairs after a 96-hour sleep-filled delay. We found that greater post-encoding sleep continuity predicted better delayed context memory performance for mismatching pairs across age groups. Post-encoding sleep continuity was also associated with larger ERP differences between context hits and misses for context-matching pairs, for ERP effects associated with post-retrieval monitoring operations across age groups. Together, these findings suggest that more continuous, naturalistic post-encoding sleep facilitates episodic memory performance and neural mechanisms supporting episodic memory retrieval across adult age.

Social media users often feel that time vanishes while scrolling, but real feeds confound novelty, rewards, social signals, and self-paced control, leaving the driver of this distortion unclear. We tested whether self-paced visual exploration is sufficient to compress subjective time by comparing active scrolling with passive, yoked viewing and a static baseline. Twenty-three adults viewed sequences of natural images under three within-subject conditions: Scrolling (self-paced mouse clicks), Watching (a passive, yoked replay of their own scrolling sequence), and a Baseline (a static image). Participants estimated the elapsed duration of each block. Subjective duration was most compressed under Scrolling (48% of elapsed time), followed by Watching (51%) and Baseline (65%). Two sources separated these effects. Adding back the empty inter-image fixations brought the image-rich conditions to within seconds of the Baseline, showing that observers barely counted the blank gaps; the Scrolling--Watching difference, by contrast, was independent of these shared gaps, isolating self-paced control as a second source of compression. Electrophysiology linked that control to anticipatory neural states and the timing of early visual responses, with no amplified encoding of individual images. The results favor an attention-weighted account of timing, on which subjective duration tracks how much attention reaches the clock, a resource that a self-paced stream and its uncounted gaps both draw away.

Prosody is a fundamental aspect of speech characterized by suprasegmental features such as pitch. Prosodic pitch contours are used to convey speakers intentions, for example, to make a statement or ask a question. Understanding these intentions requires abstracting continuous, variable pitch information into discrete categories. Category perception has been proposed to recruit the motor system in an effector-specific manner, whereby cortical areas controlling motor effectors support speech sound recognition by identifying articulatory gestures. However, it remains unclear whether effectors involved in pitch production similarly contribute to prosodic category perception. To address this question, we collected magnetoencephalography data from 29 participants (15 females) while they first sang pitches arranged in five-tone melodies and then identified the prosody (Statement vs. Question) of single words varying in pitch contour along a five-level continuum. Using a region-restricted searchlight approach to decode singing from rest, we localized two premotor regions for pitch production, corresponding to the ventral and dorsal laryngeal motor cortex (LMC). A separate neural decoding analysis revealed that perceived prosodic categories were decodable in these regions, especially from the dorsal LMC that is more closely associated with pitch regulation. Importantly, decoding performance mirrored behavioral discriminability of prosodic categories across the continuum, suggesting that these regions are involved in perceptual decision-making. Finally, pitch motor areas exchanged category-related information with auditory regions, indicating these areas do not merely echo the processing in auditory regions. Together, these findings highlight effector-specific motor support for prosodic category perception, thereby broadening our understanding of motor involvement in speech perception. Significance StatementSpeech perception has been proposed to recruit the premotor cortex, with different subregions linking speech sounds to the articulatory gestures used to produce them. We investigated this idea through prosody--pitch changes in speech conveying meanings such as statements and questions. Using magnetoencephalography, we identified pitch motor areas during a singing task and tested whether they represent perceived prosodic categories. We found that prosodic categories were distinguishable in these regions and that this neural discriminability mirrored behavioral discriminability across clear and ambiguous prosody, suggesting involvement in perceptual decision-making. These findings are unlikely to reflect passive echoes from auditory regions, as pitch motor areas actively influenced them during categorical processing. Our results highlight effector-specific motor support for forming abstract prosodic representations.

Coherent scenes facilitate object recognition, but the representational basis of this facilitation and its temporal evolution in the brain remain unclear. We tested this question using EEG and multivariate pattern analysis while 15 participants categorized objects from five semantic categories after a 500-ms preview of either an intact rendered scene or a phase-scrambled version of the same background. Reliable object decoding emerged earlier in intact scenes than scrambled scenes (142 {+/-} 5 vs. 162 {+/-} 10 ms), with higher decoding for intact scenes from 124 to 268 ms after object onset. Cross-condition decoding object information that generalized across scene formats, whereas subtracting cross-condition from within-condition decoding identified an earlier and stronger context-dependent component when scene structure was coherent. Cross-temporal representational similarity analysis (RSA) further showed that representational structure established during late scene preview generalized to early object processing only for intact scenes, linking contextual facilitation to anticipatory scene-derived representations. Finally, model-to-brain RSA showed that a language-aligned model explained neural representational geometry in intact scenes better than vision-only models, an advantage attenuated by scene scrambling. These findings indicate that coherent scene context shapes object coding by accelerating object-selective processing and contributing context-dependent representational structure beyond a context-invariant object code.