Modeling how unique childhood experience impacts the representational structure of frontal and parietal cortex

Abstract

While regions of human cortex underlying the initial processing of sensory information have clear organizational principles1,2, when and how high-order regions organize and develop across childhood is comparatively unknown. Topographical representations of different visual stimulus categories show how familiarity to a certain stimulus plays a role in the functional organization of visual cortex3,4. It has also been shown that interactions between frontal and parietal cortex modulate selective attention and action selection by reading information from occipitotemporal cortex (OTC)5, but whether or not different categories of visual information have unique representation patterns in parietal and frontal cortex, and how learning a new visual category may change the functional representation of these attention-based brain regions that are classically thought of as static, is relatively unknown. With functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured the organization of low- and high-level fronto-parietal cortical regions to understand how a novel visual stimulus, Pokémon, affects neural activity in those regions. Multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was then used to determine to what extent a subject’s familiarity with a stimulus impacts neural activity in select regions of interest (ROIs) that play a role in attention and memory. We found that Pokémon experts had sharper activity patterns for Pokémon stimuli than in novices. In addition, in Pokémon experts, as representational patterns to Pokémon stimuli were sharper, so were the representational patterns to other categorical stimuli. Neural activity patterns to Pokémon stimuli were also shared across experts. The findings of the study indicate that childhood expertise in a novel category of visual stimuli shapes the representational structure of frontal and parietal cortices.