Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics during sustained conscious visual perception.

When people view a steady, unchanging image, the brain's sensory regions maintain a stable representation of what is being seen, even as overall neural activity changes over time. In contrast, frontal and parietal brain areas only represent the image's content briefly at the moment it first appears. These findings, based on intracranial recordings from ten people with epilepsy, suggest that sustained conscious perception may depend on sensory cortex, while discrete perceptual updates may rely on frontoparietal regions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Instances of sustained stationary sensory input are ubiquitous. However, previous work focused almost exclusively on transient onset responses. This presents a critical challenge for neural theories of consciousness, which should account for the full temporal extent of experience. To address this question, we use intracranial recordings from ten human patients with epilepsy to view diverse images of multiple durations. We reveal that, in sensory regions, despite dramatic changes in activation magnitude, the distributed representation of categories and exemplars remains sustained and stable. In contrast, in frontoparietal regions, we find transient content representation at stimulus onset. Our results highlight the connection between the anatomical and temporal correlates of experience. To the extent perception is sustained, it may rely on sensory representations and to the extent perception is discrete, centered on perceptual updating, it may rely on frontoparietal representations.