Pre-frontal cortex guides dimension-reducing transformations in the occipito-ventral pathway for categorization behaviors

Highlights•Occipital cortex represents both task-relevant and irrelevant features before 120 ms•Only task-relevant features advance to the temporal region•During 121–150 ms, occipital representations reduce to lower-dimensional manifolds•These manifolds then transform into task-relevant features from 161 to 350 msSummaryTo interpret our surroundings, the brain uses a visual categorization process. Current theories and models suggest that this process comprises a hierarchy of different computations that transforms complex, high-dimensional inputs into lower-dimensional representations (i.e., manifolds) in support of multiple categorization behaviors. Here, we tested this hypothesis by analyzing these transformations reflected in dynamic MEG source activity while individual participants actively categorized the same stimuli according to different tasks: face expression, face gender, pedestrian gender, and vehicle type. Results reveal three transformation stages guided by the pre-frontal cortex. At stage 1 (high-dimensional, 50–120 ms), occipital sources represent both task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimulus features; task-relevant features advance into higher ventral/dorsal regions, whereas task-irrelevant features halt at the occipital-temporal junction. At stage 2 (121–150 ms), stimulus feature representations reduce to lower-dimensional manifolds, which then transform into the task-relevant features underlying categorization behavior over stage 3 (161–350 ms). Our findings shed light on how the brain's network mechanisms transform high-dimensional inputs into specific feature manifolds that support multiple categorization behaviors.Graphical abstract