Date of Graduation

8-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Physics (MS)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Physics

Advisor/Mentor

Shew, Woodrow L.

Committee Member

Wang, Yong

Second Committee Member

Leong, Josiah K.

Keywords

Cognitive neuroscience; Visual system; Compartmentalization

Abstract

The visual system’s remarkable ability to process vast amounts of sensory information rapidly and accurately is fundamental to cognitive neuroscience. This study investigates a key aspect of this capability: the compartmentalization of information into feature-specific subspaces during bottom-up communication. My primary question was: does Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) reveal a subspace that encodes color and direction of moving dot stimuli? I found that the first canonical component (CC1) does an excellent job decoding the stimuli, despite being one-dimensional while the stimuli were drawn from a two-dimensional space (red-green and up-down plane). I demonstrate that motion features are processed within distinct subspaces, facilitating communication from the Middle Temporal (MT) area to the V4 and Lateral Intraparietal (LIP) regions. Concurrently, color features are handled in separate subspaces, enabling communication from MT to V4 and Inferior Temporal (IT) regions.

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