Humans have a remarkable capacity to arrange and rearrange perceptual input according to different categorizations. This begs the question whether the categorization is exclusively a higher visual or amodal process, or whether categorization processes influence early visual areas as well. To investigate this we scanned healthy participants in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner during a conceptual decision task in which participants had to answer questions about upcoming images of animals. Early visual cortices (V1 and V2) contained information about the current visual input, about the granularity of the forthcoming categorical decision, as well as perceptual expectations about the upcoming visual stimulus. The middle temporal gyrus, the anterior temporal lobe, and the inferior frontal gyrus were also involved in the categorization process, constituting an attention and control network that modulates perceptual processing. These findings provide further evidence that early visual processes are driven by conceptual expectations and task demands.

中文翻译：

---

视觉感知的预期性和任务驱动性

人类具有根据不同类别安排和重新安排感知输入的非凡能力。这就引出了一个问题，即分类是否完全是一种高级视觉或非模态过程，或者分类过程是否也影响早期视觉区域。为了对此进行调查，我们在一项概念决策任务中使用磁共振成像扫描仪扫描了健康参与者，参与者必须回答有关即将拍摄的动物图像的问题。早期的视觉皮层（V1 和 V2）包含有关当前视觉输入的信息、即将进行的分类决策的粒度以及对即将到来的视觉刺激的感知预期。颞中回、颞前叶和额下回也参与了分类过程，构成一个调节感知处理的注意力和控制网络。这些发现进一步证明了早期视觉过程是由概念期望和任务需求驱动的。