A Cortical Network for the Encoding of Object Change

Understanding events often requires recognizing unique stimuli as alternative, mutually exclusive states of the same persisting object. Using fMRI, we examined the neural mechanisms underlying the rep-resentation of object states and object-state changes. We found that subjective ratings of visual dissimilarity between a depicted object and an unseen alternative state of that object predicted the corre-sponding multivoxel pattern dissimilarity in early visual cortex during an imagery task, while late visual cortex patterns tracked dissimilar-ity among distinct objects. Early visual cortex pattern dissimilarity for object states in turn predicted the level of activation in an area of left posterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (pVLPFC) most respon-sive to conflict in a separate Stroop color-word interference task, and an area of left ventral posterior parietal cortex (vPPC) implicated in the relational binding of semantic features. We suggest that when visualizing object states, representational content instantiated across early and late visual cortex is modulated by processes in left pVLPFC and left vPPC that support selection and binding, and ulti-mately event comprehension