Hierarchical categorization learning is associated with representational changes in the dorsal striatum and posterior frontal and parietal cortex.

Learning and recognition can be improved by sorting novel items into categories and subcategories. Such hierarchical categorization is easy when it can be performed according to learned rules (e.g.

Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception.

Emotionally expressive music and dance occur together across the world. This may be because features shared across the senses are represented the same way even in different sensory brain areas, putting music and movement in directly comparable terms. These shared representations may arise from a general need to identify environmentally relevant combinations of sensory features, particularly those that communicate emotion.

The artist emerges: visual art learning alters neural structure and function.

How does the brain mediate visual artistic creativity? Here we studied behavioral and neural changes in drawing and painting students compared to students who did not study art. We investigated three aspects of cognition vital to many visual artists: creative cognition, perception, and perception-to-action. We found that the art students became more creative via the reorganization of prefrontal white matter but did not find any significant changes in perceptual ability or related neural activity in the art students relative to the control group.

Unconscious neural processing differs with method used to render stimuli invisible.

Visual stimuli can be kept from awareness using various methods. The extent of processing that a given stimulus receives in the absence of awareness is typically used to make claims about the role of consciousness more generally. The neural processing elicited by a stimulus, however, may also depend on the method used to keep it from awareness, and not only on whether the stimulus reaches awareness.

Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace.

The conscious manipulation of mental representations is central to many creative and uniquely human abilities. How does the human brain mediate such flexible mental operations? Here, multivariate pattern analysis of functional MRI data reveals a widespread neural network that performs specific mental manipulations on the contents of visual imagery. Evolving patterns of neural activity within this mental workspace track the sequence of informational transformations carried out by these manipulations.

Pattern classification precedes region-average hemodynamic response in early visual cortex.

How quickly can information about the neural response to a visual stimulus be detected in the hemodynamic response measured using fMRI? Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) uses pattern classification to detect subtle stimulus-specific information from patterns of responses among voxels, including information that cannot be detected in the average response across a given brain region. Here we use MVPA in combination with rapid temporal sampling of the fMRI signal to investigate the temporal evolution of classification accuracy and its relationship to the average regional hemodynamic response. In primary visual cortex (V1) stimulus information can be detected in the pattern of voxel responses more than a second before the average hemodynamic response of V1 deviates from baseline, and classification accuracy peaks before the peak of the average hemodynamic response.