Representing experience over time: sustained sensory patterns and transient frontroparietal patterns

Abstract

Everyday visual experience contains many brief stationary moments when we continue to be consciously aware our sensory input. However, neural activity is dramatically attenuated shortly after the onset response, and it is unclear how the content of our experience remains stable nevertheless. To characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of object representation in sustained viewing conditions, we use intracranial recordings from ten patients viewing images from variable categories in multiple durations. We reveal that the distributed neural representation of categories and exemplars in posterior-sensory regions remains sustained and stable, mirroring the stability of experience, despite substantial variability in activity after the onset response. Additionally, we find transient coding of visual content in frontoparietal cortex, even when no report is required. Together, our results suggest sustained perception is maintained by sensory regions, not by overall activation magnitude but by the position within an "Experience Subspace", and perceptual changes involve frontoparietal regions, regardless of the task. These findings directly inform recent large-scale attempts to test theories of consciousness.

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