Neural and behavioral signatures of the multidimensionality of manipulable object processing

Understanding how we recognize everyday objects requires unravelling the variables that govern the way we think about objects and the way in which our representations are organized neurally. A major hypothesis is that the organization of object knowledge follows key object-related dimensions, analogously to how sensory information is organized in the brain. Here, we explored, behaviorally and neurally, the multidimensionality of object processing. We focused on within-domain object information as a proxy for the kinds of object decision tasks we typically engage in our daily lives – e.g., identifying a knife from other types of manipulable objects such as spoons, axes or screwdrivers. To do so, we extracted object-related dimensions from subjective human judgments on a set of objects from a particular object domain – i.e., manipulable objects. We demonstrated that the extracted dimensions are cognitively interpretable – i.e., participants are able to label them; are cognitively relevant for manipulable object processing – i.e., categorization decisions are guided by these dimensions; and are important for the neural organization of knowledge – i.e., they are good predictors of the neural signals elicited by manipulable objects. This shows that multidimensionality is a hallmark of the organization of object knowledge in the brain.