Unveiling the brain: Scientists identify strategies behind object recognition
When we think about objects, our mental space is organised into dimensions that help the brain recognise and organise information about objects, playing a pivotal role in the neural organization of knowledge by shaping and guiding our behaviour and interactions with objects.
English version: Diana Taborda
How does our brain recognise objects? A team led by the University of Coimbra (UC) has conducted a research study to help answer this question. The study reveals that when we think about objects, our mental space is organised into dimensions that help the brain recognise and organise information about objects. These dimensions play a pivotal role in the neural organization of knowledge, shaping and guiding our behaviour and interactions with objects.
This is one of the conclusions of a study led by Jorge Almeida, professor and researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPCEUC) of the University of Coimbra (UC). The findings, published in the journal Communications Biology — a distinguished publication within the Nature group — involved 400 participants aged between 18 and 41 who were presented with 80 common everyday objects, including tools such as a drill or a wrench, as well as other objects such as a whistle or a basketball.
Participants completed behavioural tasks and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Among other things, they were asked to judge the similarity of different objects in terms of their visual appearance (including material and shape), their function (what they are used for) and the way they are manipulated (the movements used to interact with them).
“When we observe what is around us, we place all of that in a multidimensional mental space. This is how we organise information in the brain, and this means that when we recognise an object or distinguish it from another, we are navigating this multidimensional mental space and thus distinguishing the different inputs (i.e. objects) in this space,” explains Jorge Almeida. “This discovery makes it possible to predict human behaviour towards objects and understand the neural responses involved.”, adds Almeida, who is also the Director of the Proaction Lab and researcher at the Research Centre for Neuropsychology and Cognitive-Behavioural Intervention (CINEICC).
With their study, "Neural and Behavioural Signatures of the Multidimensionality of Manipulable Object Processing", the research team is adding new pieces to the puzzle of our understanding of the brain, specifically with regard to object recognition, which, while seemingly simple, turns out to be quite complex. “We believe that this organising strategy is what helps us navigate the world, this multi-dimensionality of object recognition. This way of organising information can certainly be applied to other categories, such as faces, animals or even food,” adds Jorge Almeida.
The study, conducted under the project ContentMAP, with Jorge Almeida as Principal Investigator, was funded by the European Research Council (ERC). As the first Portuguese project in the field of psychology to secure an ERC grant, ContentMAP aims to map the organisation of object knowledge in the brain—a crucial step toward understanding how we recognise objects rapidly and effectively.
The scientific paper, which involved a team of researchers from the UC, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Glasgow (UK), is available here.