TY - JOUR T1 - Preserved position information in high-level visual cortex with large receptive fields JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/073940 SP - 073940 AU - Kei Majima AU - Paul Sukhanov AU - Tomoyasu Horikawa AU - Yukiyasu Kamitani Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/07/073940.abstract N2 - Neurons in high-level visual areas respond to more complex visual features with broader receptive fields (RFs) compared to those in low-level visual areas. Thus, high-level visual areas are generally considered to carry less information regarding the position of seen objects in the visual field. However, larger RFs may not imply loss of position information at the population level. Here, we evaluated how accurately the position of a seen object could be predicted (decoded) from activity patterns in each of six representative visual areas with different RF sizes (V1-V4, LOC, and FFA). We collected fMRI responses while subjects viewed a ball randomly moving in a two-dimensional field. To estimate population RF sizes of individual fMRI voxels, RF models were fitted for individual voxels in each brain area. The voxels in higher visual areas showed larger estimated RFs than those in lower visual areas. Then, the ball's position in a separate session was predicted by maximum likelihood estimation using the RF models of individual voxels. We also tested a model-free multivoxel regression (support vector regression, SVR) to predict the position. We found that regardless of the difference in RF size, all visual areas showed similar prediction accuracies, especially on the horizontal dimension. The results suggest that precise position information is available in population activity of higher visual cortex, and that it may be used in later neural processing for recognition and behavior.Significance statement High-level ventral visual areas are thought to achieve position invariance with larger receptive fields at the cost of the loss of precise position information. However, larger receptive fields may not imply loss of position information at the population level. Here, multivoxel fMRI decoding reveals that high-level visual areas are predictive of an object’s position with similar accuracies to low-level visual areas, preserving the information potentially available for later processing. ER -