Selecting and perceiving multiple visual objects in the mind and brain

Yaoda Xu

Harvard University


Many everyday activities, such as driving on a busy street, require the encoding of multiple
distinctive visual objects from crowded scenes. To explain how multiple visual objects are
attended and perceived, synthesizing and extending existing ideas in visual cognition, I will
describe the neural object file theory, which proposes that our visual system first selects a fixed
number of about four objects from a crowded scene based on their spatial information (object
individuation) and then encodes their details (object identification). I will show the involvement
of the inferior intra-parietal sulcus (IPS) in object individuation and the superior IPS and higher
visual areas in object identification. This neural object file theory provides a better
understanding of the role of the different parietal areas in encoding visual objects and can
explain various forms of capacity-limited processing in visual cognition such as visual short-
term memory.