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Extensive sampling of neural activity during rich cognitive phenomena is critical for robust understanding of brain function. Here we present the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), in which high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging responses to tens of thousands of richly annotated natural scenes were measured while participants performed a continuous recognition task. To optimize data quality, we developed and applied novel estimation and denoising techniques. Simple visual inspections of the NSD data reveal clear representational transformations along the ventral visual pathway. Further exemplifying the inferential power of the dataset, we used NSD to build and train deep neural network models that predict brain activity more accurately than state-of-the-art models from computer vision. NSD also includes substantial resting-state and diffusion data, enabling network neuroscience perspectives to constrain and enhance models of perception and memory. Given its unprecedented scale, quality and breadth, NSD opens new avenues of inquiry in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.The authors measured high-resolution fMRI activity from eight individuals who saw and memorized thousands of annotated natural images over 1 year. This massive dataset enables new paths of inquiry in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

We have come to recognize the brain as a predictive organ, anticipating attributes of the incoming sensory stimulation to guide perception and action in the service of adaptive behaviour. In the quest to understand the neural bases of the modulatory prospective signals that prioritize and select relevant events during perception, one fundamental dimension has until recently been largely overlooked: time. In this Review, we introduce the burgeoning field of temporal attention and illustrate how the brain makes use of various forms of temporal regularities in the environment to guide adaptive behaviour and influence neural processing.

The complex multi-stage architecture of cortical visual pathways provides the neural basis for efficient visual object recognition in humans. However, the stage-wise computations therein remain poorly understood. Here, we compared temporal (magnetoencephalography) and spatial (functional MRI) visual brain representations with representations in an artificial deep neural network (DNN) tuned to the statistics of real-world visual recognition. We showed that the DNN captured the stages of human visual processing in both time and space from early visual areas towards the dorsal and ventral streams. Further investigation of crucial DNN parameters revealed that while model architecture was important, training on real-world categorization was necessary to enforce spatio-temporal hierarchical relationships with the brain. Together our results provide an algorithmically informed view on the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual object recognition in the human visual brain.

The anterior hippocampus is thought to be involved in a wide range of cognitive functions, including memory, navigation and perception. In this Opinion article, Zeidman and Maguire show how improved functional imaging techniques are shedding light on the precise anatomy of this region and the contribution of different parts of the anterior hippocampus to specific cognitive functions. The brain creates a model of the world around us. We can use this representation to perceive and comprehend what we see at any given moment, but also to vividly re-experience scenes from our past and imagine future (or even fanciful) scenarios. Recent work has shown that these cognitive functions — perception, imagination and recall of scenes and events — all engage the anterior hippocampus. In this Opinion article, we capitalize on new findings from functional neuroimaging to propose a model that links high-level cognitive functions to specific structures within the anterior hippocampus.

The authors demonstrate that activity patterns in the default network during unguided spoken recollection of real-world events were similar between individuals recalling the same specific events. Patterns were altered between perception and recall in a systematic manner across brains. These results reveal a common spatial organization for memory representations. Our lives revolve around sharing experiences and memories with others. When different people recount the same events, how similar are their underlying neural representations? Participants viewed a 50-min movie, then verbally described the events during functional MRI, producing unguided detailed descriptions lasting up to 40 min. As each person spoke, event-specific spatial patterns were reinstated in default-network, medial-temporal, and high-level visual areas. Individual event patterns were both highly discriminable from one another and similar among people, suggesting consistent spatial organization. In many high-order areas, patterns were more similar between people recalling the same event than between recall and perception, indicating systematic reshaping of percept into memory. These results reveal the existence of a common spatial organization for memories in high-level cortical areas, where encoded information is largely abstracted beyond sensory constraints, and that neural patterns during perception are altered systematically across people into shared memory representations for real-life events.

A working memory task in rats demonstrates that the posterior parietal cortex is a critical locus for the representation and use of prior stimulus information. How sensory history affects behaviour Recent sensory experiences, even when irrelevant to the current task at hand, bias memory and perception in humans and monkeys. Carlos Brody and colleagues show that sensory stimulus history also influences the working memory of rats. Silencing the activity of the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), an area previously implicated in working memory, paradoxically improved the rats' performance in a memory and behaviour task—identifying and reporting the loudest of two auditory stimuli. This improvement was due to the selective reduction of the effects of previous sensory stimuli. Electrophysiological recordings showed that PPC neurons carried more information about sensory stimuli of previous trials than about stimuli of the current trial. These findings suggest a role for PPC in maintaining information on recent sensory history. Many models of cognition and of neural computations posit the use and estimation of prior stimulus statistics 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 : it has long been known that working memory and perception are strongly impacted by previous sensory experience, even when that sensory history is not relevant to the current task at hand. Nevertheless, the neural mechanisms and regions of the brain that are necessary for computing and using such prior experience are unknown. Here we report that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is a critical locus for the representation and use of prior stimulus information. We trained rats in an auditory parametric working memory task, and found that they displayed substantial and readily quantifiable behavioural effects of sensory-stimulus history, similar to those observed in humans 5 , 6 and monkeys 7 . Earlier proposals that the PPC supports working memory 8 , 9 predict that optogenetic silencing of this region would impair behaviour in our working memory task. Contrary to this prediction, we found that silencing the PPC significantly improved performance. Quantitative analyses of behaviour revealed that this improvement was due to the selective reduction of the effects of prior sensory stimuli. Electrophysiological recordings showed that PPC neurons carried far more information about the sensory stimuli of previous trials than about the stimuli of the current trial. Furthermore, for a given rat, the more information about previous trial sensory history in the neural firing rates of the PPC, the greater the behavioural effect of sensory history, suggesting a tight link between behaviour and PPC representations of stimulus history. Our results indicate that the PPC is a central component in the processing of sensory-stimulus history, and could enable further neurobiological investigation of long-standing questions regarding how perception and working memory are affected by prior sensory information.

The ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are two major prefrontal regions that usually interact in serving different cognitive functions. On the other hand, these regions are also involved in cognitive processing of emotions but their contribution to emotional processing is not well-studied. In the present study, we investigated the role of these regions in three dimensions (valence, arousal and dominance) of emotional processing of stimuli via ratings of visual stimuli performed by the study participants on these dimensions. Twenty- two healthy adult participants (mean age 25.21 ± 3.84 years) were recruited and received anodal and sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (1.5 mA, 15 min) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in three separate sessions with an at least 72-h interval. During stimulation, participants underwent an emotional task in each stimulation condition. The task included 100 visual stimuli and participants were asked to rate them with respect to valence, arousal, and dominance. Results show a significant effect of stimulation condition on different aspects of emotional processing. Specifically, anodal tDCS over the dlPFC significantly reduced valence attribution for positive pictures. In contrast, anodal tDCS over the vmPFC significantly reduced arousal ratings. Dominance ratings were not affected by the intervention. Our results suggest that the dlPFC is involved in control and regulation of valence of emotional experiences, while the vmPFC might be involved in the extinction of arousal caused by emotional stimuli. Our findings implicate dimension-specific processing of emotions by different prefrontal areas which has implications for disorders characterized by emotional disturbances such as anxiety or mood disorders.

Individuals with autism and individuals with dyslexia both show reduced use of previous sensory information (stimuli statistics) in perceptual tasks, even though these are very different neurodevelopmental disorders. To better understand how past sensory information influences the perceptual experience in these disorders, we first investigated the trial-by-trial performance of neurotypical participants in a serial discrimination task. Neurotypical participants overweighted recent stimuli, revealing fast updating of internal sensory models, which is adaptive in changing environments. They also weighted the detailed stimuli distribution inferred by longer-term accumulation of stimuli statistics, which is adaptive in stable environments. Compared to neurotypical participants, individuals with dyslexia weighted earlier stimuli less heavily, whereas individuals with autism spectrum disorder weighted recent stimuli less heavily. Investigating the dynamics of perceptual inference reveals that individuals with dyslexia rely more on information about the immediate past, whereas perception in individuals with autism is dominated by longer-term statistics.Lieder et al show that individuals with dyslexia and individuals with ASD rely mostly on recent and earlier perceptual information, respectively, during perceptual tasks. This may explain the unique difficulties associated with the two conditions.

Cognition can be conceptualized as a set of algorithmic control functions whose real-time deployment determines how an organism stores and uses information to guide thought and action. A subset of these functions is required for goal-directed selection and amplification of sensory signals—broadly referred to as attention—and for its flexible control and its interaction with processes such as working memory and decision making. While the contribution of recurrent cortical microcircuits to cognition has been extensively studied, the role of the thalamus is just beginning to be elucidated. Here we highlight recent studies across rodents and primates showing how thalamus contributes to attentional control. In addition to high-fidelity information relay to or between cortical regions, thalamic circuits shift and sustain functional interactions within and across cortical areas. This thalamic process enables rapid coordination of spatially segregated cortical computations, thereby constructing task-relevant functional networks. Because such function may be critical for cognitive flexibility, clarifying its mechanisms will likely expand our basic understanding of cognitive control and its perturbation in disease. The authors propose a new framework for the thalamus in cognition. They review findings from rodents and primates, emphasizing thalamic control of functional cortical connectivity, its putative mechanisms and role in flexible construction of task-relevant cortical networks.

Semantic information in the human brain is organized into multiple networks, but the fine-grain relationships between them are poorly understood. In this study, we compared semantic maps obtained from two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments in the same participants: one that used silent movies as stimuli and another that used narrative stories. Movies evoked activity from a network of modality-specific, semantically selective areas in visual cortex. Stories evoked activity from another network of semantically selective areas immediately anterior to visual cortex. Remarkably, the pattern of semantic selectivity in these two distinct networks corresponded along the boundary of visual cortex: for visual categories represented posterior to the boundary, the same categories were represented linguistically on the anterior side. These results suggest that these two networks are smoothly joined to form one contiguous map. This study shows that visual areas pass information to the amodal semantic system through semantically selective channels aligned at the border of visual cortex. This architecture might support the integration of visual perception and semantic memory.