Distributed representations of behaviorally relevant object dimensions in the human visual system

Object vision is commonly thought to involve a hierarchy of brain regions processing increasingly complex image features, with high-level visual cortex supporting object recognition and categorization. However, object vision supports diverse behavioral goals, suggesting basic limitations of this category-centric framework. To address these limitations, we mapped a series of dimensions derived from a large-scale analysis of human similarity judgments directly onto the brain. Our results reveal broadly distributed representations of behaviorally-relevant information, demonstrating selectivity to a wide variety of novel dimensions while capturing known selectivities for visual features and categories. Behavior-derived dimensions were superior to categories at predicting brain responses, yielding mixed selectivity in much of visual cortex and sparse selectivity in category-selective clusters. This framework reconciles seemingly disparate findings regarding regional specialization, explaining category selectivity as a special case of sparse response profiles among representational dimensions, suggesting a more expansive view on visual processing in the human brain.