How does the brain encode and represent objects? Functional
brain imaging has revealed that the human ventral object vision
pathway has a complex functional architecture. Different categories
of objects evoke different patterns of response across the brain.
Based on standard methods for analyzing and interpreting functional
brain imaging results, activity patterns are usually described in terms of
the locations of regions that respond more strongly to one category,
for example, faces, than to all others. We believe that combinatorial codes
are one of the most efficient ways of coding a large set of responses in
a redundant and lossless way and that it is highly likely that
combinatorial codes are expressed at the voxel level to represent objects.