抄録
Object categories can be hierarchically ordered from abstract to concrete levels. Previous studies showed that the corresponding hierarchy can be found in spatial patterns of human brain activity. However, it remains unclear when each object category is represented in human brain activity patterns and whether it is also ordered in a hierarchical manner in the time domain according to the level of category abstraction. In this study, we measured human brain activity patterns in high temporal resolution using magnetoencephalography while subjects observed object images selected from multiple categories. We estimated cortical current distributions and then applied multivariate pattern analyses to estimate the timings at which each object category is represented in brain activity patterns. Our present results showed no significant difference in latency of object category representation along the level of category abstraction, suggesting possibility that object category information is represented at similar latency in the human brain irrespective of their levels of abstraction.