Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics during sustained conscious visual perception.
Cell reports July 25, 2023 Gal Vishne, Edden M Gerber, Robert T Knight et al.
When people view a steady, unchanging image, the brain's sensory regions maintain a stable representation of what is being seen, even as overall neural activity changes over time. In contrast, frontal and parietal brain areas only represent the image's content briefly at the moment it first appears. These findings, based on intracranial recordings from ten people with epilepsy, suggest that sustained conscious perception may depend on sensory cortex, while discrete perceptual updates may rely on frontoparietal regions.