Animate Categories Show Higher Cross-Duration Representational Selectivity in Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex Under Brief Visual Input.

Overview

1. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
2. School of Psychology, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China
3. Jilin Provincial Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Mental Health, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China

Abstract

Highlights: What are the main findings? In the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, animate categories showed higher cross-duration category information than inanimate categories, suggesting that brief-presentation patterns corresponded more selectively to same-category patterns under extended viewing. This effect remained after excluding the human-head category and was consistent across ROI-definition strategies and robustness analyses, suggesting that it was not driven solely by human heads or by a particular ROI definition.

What are the implications of the main findings? Within-category visual homogeneity contributed to cross-duration category information, but the measured feature spaces did not fully account for the animate-category advantage. The advantage may reflect both animacy-related representational organization and visual-structural factors, providing a candidate representational account of animate-category processing under limited input.

Abstract: Background: The human visual system can extract object-category information from extremely brief visual input, and animate categories often show behavioral advantages over inanimate categories in rapid categorization, visual search, and change-detection tasks. Motivated by these behavioral findings, the present study asked whether, at the representational level, animate categories elicit more category-selective neural patterns than inanimate categories in the ventral visual cortex under brief input. Methods: Using fMRI and correlation-based multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we examined whether activity patterns elicited by animate categories in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex under a 33 ms brief-presentation condition corresponded more selectively to same-category patterns under a 500 ms extended-viewing condition than did patterns elicited by inanimate categories. During scanning, participants viewed animate and inanimate stimuli, each comprising four basic-level subcategories, and performed a noise-detection task that did not require explicit category judgments. Results: Across multiple ROI-definition strategies, animate categories showed significantly higher cross-duration category information than inanimate categories. This effect also remained significant after excluding the human-head category, which contained human-face information. Stimulus-level image-feature analyses further showed that within-category visual homogeneity explained part of the variance in cross-duration category information, particularly in the full stimulus set that included human heads. However, a composite visual homogeneity index derived from HOG, Gabor, and ResNet50 features did not fully account for the higher cross-duration category information observed for animate categories. Conclusions: Overall, these results suggest that, when visual input is highly limited, animate categories elicit VOTC multivoxel patterns that correspond more selectively to same-category patterns under extended viewing.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

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• osf:pfz5b — at OSF; found in “Data Availability Statement”

Data Availability Statement

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author due to privacy or ethical restrictions. Supporting materials have been deposited on the Open Science Framework (OSF) and can be accessed at https://osf.io/pfz5b/overview?view_only=71fd35128cca4164b892365b1c1a5ccb (accessed on 24 June 2026).

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 2 authors, 7 keywords, 1 funder, 52 references.

Cite

This paper

Wang, Y., & Lu, X. (2026). Animate Categories Show Higher Cross-Duration Representational Selectivity in Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex Under Brief Visual Input. Brain sciences, 16(7), 668. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci16070668

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