Abstract

Our brain builds increasingly sophisticated representations along the ventral visual pathway to support object recognition, but how these representations unfold over time is poorly understood. Here we characterized time-varying representations of faces, places, and objects throughout the pathway using human intracranial electroencephalography. For ∼100 ms after an initial feedforward sweep, representations at all stages evolved to be less driven by low-order features and more categorical. Low-level areas like V1 showed unexpected, late-emerging tolerance to image size, and late but not early responses of high-level occipitotemporal areas best matched their fMRI responses. Besides aligned, simultaneous representational changes, we found a trial-by-trial association between concurrent response patterns across stages. Our results suggest fast, multi-areal recurrent processing builds upon initial feedforward processing to generate more sophisticated object representations.