Leyla Isik, post-doctoral researcher at MIT and Boston Children's Hospital, explains how to use neural decoding to study object and action recognition in the human brain. By decoding the information contained in MEG signals measured in human observers viewing images of visual scenes and objects, Dr. Isik shows how object representations in the brain, that are invariant to size and position, develop in stages over 150 ms. Action representations in the brain, generated while viewing videos of humans performing different actions, are extracted within 200 ms and are immediately invariant to changes in actor and viewpoint.

Video:

• Using neural decoding to study object and action recognition in the human brain  (1:03:53)

Additional Resources:

• Leyla Isik's website
• Isik, L., Meyers, E., Leibo, J. Z. & Poggio, T. (2014) The dynamics of invariant object recognition in the human visual system, Journal of Neurophysiology 111(1):91-102.
• Isik, L., Tacchetti, A. & Poggio, T. (2018) A fast, invariant representation for human action in the visual system, Journal of Neurophysiology 119(2):631-640.