Abstract: he ability to classify stimuli into meaningful categories is a fundamental cognitive function of the human being. The present review focused on the event-related brain potentials (ERP) studies on human visual categorization of natural objects. Early and late components of the ERP accompanying the visual categorization of natural objects were discussed on the basis of an extensive review of the relevant literature. Then, the paper described the mechanisms of the Rapid Visual Categorization of natural objects, and supports the view that feed-forward mechanism plays critical role in the visual processing of such complex categorization task. Finally, two separate mechanisms of visual processing were discussed in details, and it was concluded that visual categorization of a natural object involves different mechanisms with different time courses: a perceptual, task-independent mechanism, followed by a task-related, category-independent process which is correlated with the subject’s decision. Specific neural structures of these two separate processes were also discussed in this section.

Key words: event-related brain potentials, categorization, visual processing, natural object