| Affiliation: | (1) Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, Section of Brain Maturation (PO50), DeCrespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF, UK;(2) School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, 1-21-1 Nishi-Waseda, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-0051, Japan;(3) Centre for Brain and Mental Health Research, University of Newcastle, Officers Quarters Complex, James Fletcher Hospital, Newcomen Street, Newcastle, NSW 2300, Australia;(4) Brain Image Analysis Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, Department of Biostatistics & Computing (PO22), DeCrespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF, UK;(5) Department of Psychological Medicine, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;(6) Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, PO78, DeCrespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF, UK;(7) Centre for Nueroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, Section of Brain Maturation (PO89), DeCrespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF, UK;(8) Department of Psychiatry, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, Ireland |
| Abstract: | We investigated dorsal visual stream involvement in the retrieval of a variety of visual attributes of common objects, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Seven subjects made binary decisions about the shape, color, and size of named objects during scanning. Bilateral parietal activity was significantly greater during retrieval of shape and size information than during retrieval of color information. Consistent with a domain-specific distributed model of semantic organization, the finding that dorsal stream activity is associated with size and shape retrieval, as compared with color retrieval, may indicate that both size and shape information are learned partly through dorsally mediated processes, such as visually guided grasping. These results demonstrate that both visual-processing streams (i.e., the ventral “what” pathway and the dorsal “where” pathway) are involved in the storage and/or retrieval of knowledge of object appearance but that, just as in vision, these two pathways may play different roles in conceptual processing. |
