Cross-attention encoding models reveal dynamic spatiotemporal routing across human higher visual cortex

Abstract:Understanding how the brain parses actions and events from time-varying natural inputs is a central challenge in neuroscience. Recent work has used deep neural network (DNN) models to build stimulus-computable fMRI encoding models that predict single-voxel responses to complex natural videos. However, the majority of video-computable encoding models predict responses using simple linear mappings from model tokens, overlooking the spatiotemporal structure shared by video representations and neural responses. Recent cross-attention encoding models address this limitation for static images, enabling flexible stimulus-dependent weighting of image content across space. Here, we extend this framework to naturalistic video, using per-parcel cross-attention to dynamically route features from a self-supervised video model (V-JEPA-2) across both space and time, fitting this model to fMRI responses to short video clips. We compare joint spatiotemporal attention with factorized and selectively constrained alternatives, and find that joint routing improves predictions of brain responses to held-out videos across higher visual regions, most consistently in lateral and dorsal visual areas associated with dynamic motion perception. Moreover, our method provides interpretable, stimulus-specific attention maps that dynamically follow moving objects, revealing which locations and temporal moments contribute to each neural response. We further show that attention maps from parcels in different category-selective networks (face-, body-, scene-selective) differentially weight content in accordance with expected semantic selectivity. Together, this work provides a new computational framework for understanding how visual information is adaptively weighted by cortical populations during dynamic visual perception.

Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.36366 [q-bio.NC]

(or arXiv:2609.36366v1 [q-bio.NC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36366 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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