Visual semantic tuning across the cortex shifts between tasks (Zhang and Gallant, bioRxiv preprint, 2026)
February 19, 2026
Attention modulates brain representations to prioritize task-relevant information, but how visual semantic tuning shifts between naturalistic tasks is not well understood. We used voxelwise encoding models to compare visual semantic representations across the cortex in participants who watched movies versus participants who navigated a virtual city. Visual semantic tuning differs substantially between tasks—during navigation, tuning shifts increase the representation of task-relevant objects, with the strongest shifts in place-selective and visual attention regions and the weakest in human-selective regions.