News: How the Brain’s Visual Systems Help Us Understand and Act in the World

Our brains are constantly decoding the world around us—recognizing a friend’s face, spotting a moving car, or understanding someone’s gesture—all in the blink of an eye. It has been proposed that specialized visual pathways are behind these everyday feats, each playing its own role. Two of the most important—the ventral and lateral visual pathways—are thought to handle different aspects of what we see. But how exactly do they work, and how are they organized?

Professor Dr. Angelika Lingnau (picture), Chair of Psychology (Faculty of Human Sciences) at the University of Regensburg, and her US colleague Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), are taking a new approach to discovering: They are building on a data-driven approach based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained while subjects viewed a large number of short, naturalistic video clips. The researchers have now received a grant from the MIT Germany - University of Regensburg Seed Fund program to support their joint project.

Most studies so far have focused on familiar categories, like faces or tools, guided by pre-set ideas. This project takes a different route: “What excites me about this project is that we are given a chance to explore how the brain organizes visual information in ways we haven’t predefined – letting the data guide us to new insights about how we see and understand the world”, Lingnau explains.

The functional organization of the ventral and lateral visual pathway

How does the functional organization of the ventral and lateral pathway support our ability to interact with the world? Most previous approaches to examine this question were dominated by hypothesis-driven studies focusing on a small set of well-known categories. In the proposed collaboration, bringing together two groups with overlapping research interests and complementary areas of focus and expertise, the researchers aim to use a hypothesis-free, data driven approach to address several outstanding questions. Specifically, the researchers aim to examine critical features and components underlying the organization of the lateral visual pathway, and the way these features and components differ from those obtained in the ventral pathway.

By joining forces, the teams of Lingnau and Kanwisher do cutting-edge analysis to explore how the lesser-understood lateral pathway is structured—and how it compares to its better-known counterpart. In doing so, they hope to reveal how these brain systems help us navigate, interpret, and engage with the rich visual world around us.