{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"institution":[{"name":"bioRxiv"}],"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T13:35:40Z","timestamp":1785418540892,"version":"3.56.0"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,11]]},"group-title":"Neuroscience","reference-count":55,"publisher":"openRxiv","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,11]],"date-time":"2026-02-11T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1770768000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"award":["R01 EY027401"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["R01 EY027401"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01cwqze88","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["R01 EY033628"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["R01 EY033628"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01cwqze88","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["P30 EY013079"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["P30 EY013079"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01cwqze88","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["R01 EY031446"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["R01 EY031446"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01cwqze88","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["RF1 NS127122"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["RF1 NS127122"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01cwqze88","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"ASPIRE Precision Medicine Research Institute Abu Dhabi","award":["VRI-20-10"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["VRI-20-10"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,30]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>ABSTRACT<\/jats:title>\n                <jats:p>How does the visual system recognize objects in natural environments? Here, we investigate the neural computations underlying robust object recognition along the ventral stream. We adapted psychophysical critical-band masking to fMRI, measuring BOLD responses along the ventral stream to natural images perturbed by bandpass noise. We found that, along this stream, the overall BOLD response to noise alone is sensitive to an increasingly wide range of stimulus spatial frequency, from 2 octaves in V1 to 5 octaves in ventral temporal cortex (VTC). However, when we assess the effect of the same noise on the accuracy of decoding scene images from the BOLD response, we obtain a different result: Recognition bandwidth is conserved along the ventral stream at about 2 octaves, close to the 1.5-octave behavioral channel. Though the recognition band is conserved, its noise tolerance increases steadily along the ventral stream, approaching behavioral levels in VTC. These findings suggest that V1 sets the bandwidth of the object-recognition channel, while downstream areas progressively denoise the signal, establishing the channel\u2019s noise tolerance. This biological architecture\u2014early channel isolation followed by successive denoising\u2014may explain why human vision remains more robust than current machine vision.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.64898\/2026.02.10.705069","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,12]],"date-time":"2026-02-12T05:30:13Z","timestamp":1770874213000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["An increasingly efficient narrowband object-recognition channel along the ventral stream"],"prefix":"10.64898","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1017-9000","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ajay","family":"Subramanian","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7173-8104","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ekin","family":"T\u00fcn\u00e7ok","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA"},{"name":"Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2781-1236","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jan W.","family":"Kurzawski","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA"},{"name":"Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9910-5627","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Najib J.","family":"Majaj","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7100-5659","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Denis G.","family":"Pelli","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA"},{"name":"Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7475-5586","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jonathan","family":"Winawer","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA"},{"name":"Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"54368","reference":[{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1152\/jn.00291.2019"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1038\/s41593-021-00962-x"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.3","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1167\/18.13.23"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.4","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.7554\/elife.40224"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.5","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1523\/JNEUROSCI.0690-21.2022"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Burt, P. J. and Adelson, E. H. (1987). The laplacian pyramid as a compact image code. In Readings in computer vision, pages 671\u2013679. Elsevier.","DOI":"10.1016\/B978-0-08-051581-6.50065-9"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.7","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1113\/jphysiol.1968.sp008574"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.8","unstructured":"Chen, T. , Kornblith, S. , Norouzi, M. , and Hinton, G. (2020). A simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. In International conference on machine learning, pages 1597\u20131607. PmLR."},{"issue":"4-5","key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"171","DOI":"10.1002\/(SICI)1099-1492(199706\/08)10:4\/5<171::AID-NBM453>3.0.CO;2-L","article-title":"Software tools for analysis and visualization of fmri data","volume":"10","year":"1997","journal-title":"NMR in Biomedicine: An International Journal Devoted to the Development and Application of Magnetic Resonance In Vivo"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.10","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1006\/nimg.1998.0395"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Deng, J. , Dong, W. , Socher, R. , Li, L.-J. , Li, K. , and Fei-Fei, L. (2009). Imagenet: A large-scale hierarchical image database. In 2009 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 248\u2013255. Ieee.","DOI":"10.1109\/CVPR.2009.5206848"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.12","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2007.09.034"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.13","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1038\/33402"},{"issue":"1","key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"111","DOI":"10.1038\/s41592-018-0235-4","article-title":"fmriprep: a robust preprocessing pipeline for functional mri","volume":"16","year":"2019","journal-title":"Nature methods"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.15","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0015710"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.16","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2012.01.021"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.17","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1103\/RevModPhys.12.47"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.18","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1038\/nn.3402"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.19","unstructured":"Geirhos, R. , Rubisch, P. , Michaelis, C. , Bethge, M. , Wichmann, F. A. , and Brendel, W. (2018a). Imagenet-trained cnns are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness. In International conference on learning representations."},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.20","unstructured":"Geirhos, R. , Temme, C. R. , Rauber, J. , Sch\u00fctt, H. H. , Bethge, M. , and Wichmann, F. A. (2018b). Generalisation in humans and deep neural networks. Advances in neural information processing systems, 31."},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.21","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.visres.2010.09.027"},{"issue":"1","key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.22","first-page":"1","article-title":"The brain imaging data structure, a format for organizing and describing outputs of neuroimaging experiments","volume":"3","year":"2016","journal-title":"Scientific data"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.23","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2009.06.060"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.24","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1038\/nrn3747"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ha, J. , Broderick, W. F. , Kay, K. , and Winawer, J. (2025). Spatial frequency maps in human visual cortex: A replication and extension. bioRxiv.","DOI":"10.1101\/2025.01.21.634150"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.26","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1073\/pnas.1312567111"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.27","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1152\/jn.1993.70.5.1885"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.28","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1126\/science.1117593"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.29","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.cub.2014.12.050"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.30","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.7554\/eLife.22341"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.31","unstructured":"Kleiner, M. , Brainard, D. , and Pelli, D. (2007). What\u2019s new in psychtoolbox-3?"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.32","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuron.2008.10.043"},{"issue":"1","key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3876","DOI":"10.1038\/s41467-025-59101-w","article-title":"Human v4 size predicts crowding distance","volume":"16","year":"2025","journal-title":"Nature communications"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Lieber, J. D. , Oleskiw, T. D. , Simoncelli, E. P. , and Movshon, J. A. (2024). Responses of neurons in macaque v4 to object and texture images. BioRxiv, pages 2024\u201302.","DOI":"10.1101\/2024.02.20.581273"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.35","article-title":"Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks","year":"2017","journal-title":"arXiv preprint"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.36","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/S0042-6989(02)00045-7"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.37","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.tins.2006.04.001"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.38","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/mrm.22361"},{"issue":"11","key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e1004499","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pcbi.1004499","article-title":"The elementary operations of human vision are not reducible to template-matching","volume":"11","year":"2015","journal-title":"PLoS computational biology"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.40","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1152\/jn.00513.2004"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.41","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1152\/jn.00127.2013"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.42","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.7554\/eLife.77599"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.43","unstructured":"Radford, A. , Kim, J. W. , Hallacy, C. , Ramesh, A. , Goh, G. , Agarwal, S. , Sastry, G. , Askell, A. , Mishkin, P. , Clark, J. , et al. (2021). Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. In International conference on machine learning, pages 8748\u20138763. PmLR."},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.44","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rosenke, M. , Van den Hurk, J. , Margalit, E. , Op de Beeck, H. , Grill-Spector, K. , and Weiner, K. (2020). Extensive individual differences of category information in ventral temporal cortex in the congenitally blind. bioRxiv, pages 2020\u201306.","DOI":"10.1101\/2020.06.14.151092"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.45","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1523\/JNEUROSCI.0179-10.2010"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.46","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1523\/JNEUROSCI.2621-05.2005"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.47","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1038\/369395a0"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.48","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1523\/JNEUROSCI.4822-14.2015"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.49","first-page":"4137","article-title":"Spatial-frequency channels, shape bias, and adversarial robustness","volume":"36","year":"2023","journal-title":"Advances in neural information processing systems"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.50","article-title":"Intriguing properties of neural networks","year":"2013","journal-title":"arXiv preprint"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.51","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2017.04.040"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.52","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2013.08.068"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.53","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1017\/S0952523815000176"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.54","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2013.07.055"},{"key":"2026050409051569000_2026.02.10.705069v3.55","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1073\/pnas.1510847113"}],"container-title":[],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/syndication.highwire.org\/content\/doi\/10.64898\/2026.02.10.705069","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,4]],"date-time":"2026-05-04T16:05:28Z","timestamp":1777910728000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"http:\/\/biorxiv.org\/lookup\/doi\/10.64898\/2026.02.10.705069"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,11]]},"references-count":55,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.64898\/2026.02.10.705069","relation":{},"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,11]]},"subtype":"preprint"}}