Two new papers in Annual Review of Vision Science and Nature Comms Biology

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Bringing Vision Science Closer to the Real World, Culham, J. C. & Deligiannis, E. (2026), Annual Review of Vision Science, 12: In press.

Vision science has demonstrated considerable success in characterizing early- and mid-level visual processes through reductionism and tightly controlled experiments. However, an understanding of high-level visual processing will benefit from new technologies and approaches that bring vision science closer to the real world in all its rich complexity. We propose strategies to address problems inherent in conventional approaches. These include more natural, rich, and complex stimuli and tasks; technologies such as virtual reality that represent visual space more veridically; deeper recognition of the importance of the participant as an active agent rather than a passive observer; deeper consideration of the ecological goals of vision in the context of evolution and development, including for artificial neural network models; and new analytic and theoretical approaches that treat complexities of the natural world as data, not confounds. We provide diverse examples of how such approaches have advanced our understanding of visual processing in everyday life.

 

Actions are the building blocks of our dynamic visual world, yet the neural computations supporting action perception are not well understood. How does perceptual and conceptual information unfold in the brain when we observe what others are doing? We collected EEG and fMRI data while participants viewed short videos and sentences depicting naturalistic actions. Using representational similarity analysis, we found distinct conceptual representations along the ventral, dorsal, and lateral pathways, with the target of actions specifically encoded in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). Among conceptual features, the target of actions (i.e. whether the action was directed at an object, a person, or the self) explained the most unique variance in EEG responses. Finally, EEG-fMRI fusion revealed rapid processing along the lateral and dorsal pathways. Together, our results disentangle the perceptual and conceptual components of action understanding and characterize the underlying spatiotemporal dynamics in the human brain.