Category learning drives cortical attentional gain to diagnostic dimensions of perceptual information

We use fMRI to ask whether category-relevant perceptual information present in one frequency band is prioritized relative to simultaneous, uninformative information in the other frequency band. Only among participants expert at alien identity categorization do we observe neural prioritization of the identity-diagnostic frequency band. This prioritization persists even when the diagnostic information becomes irrelevant in the size categorization task.

Tellingly, the neural selectivity evoked implicitly in the identity categorization task aligns with that in an independent task, where activation is driven by explicit and sustained selective attention to pure tones in one or the other frequency band. Additionally, the learning trajectories taken to achieve expert-level categorization leave fingerprints on the patterns of neural activity associated with the diagnostic dimension.

In all, this indicates that learning categories can drive attentional gain to category-diagnostic input dimensions.</p>