Abstract: The visual system of the brain processes object-related visual information through the dorsal and ventral pathways. The ventral pathway is primarily responsible for object recognition processing(‘what’), while the dorsal pathway mainly handles visuospatial and motion processing of objects(‘where’). However, the dorsal and ventral pathways exhibit extensive reciprocal neural connections, indicating functional interplay between these two systems during object representation processing. On one hand, the ventral pathway cannot independently compute the global shape of objects; the integration of the dorsal pathway's representation of global shape with the ventral pathway's local feature information is necessary to support invariant visual information processing of objects. On the other hand, during goal-directed cognition and behavior, the dorsal pathway requires real-time extraction and maintenance of object visual information from the ventral pathway to achieve adaptive visual information processing of objects. The former is mainly a feature-driven (bottom-up) functional integration, whereas the latter is primarily a task-driven (top-down) functional integration. Future research should further investigate: (1) how attention modulates the dorsal pathway's representation of global object shape; (2) the mechanisms through which object familiarity regulates the integration of global shape and local features; (3) how visual working memory resists interference to maintain processing of goal-relevant stimuli; (4) the impact of endogenous memory information on adaptive visual object representations; and (5) the developmental mechanisms of dorsal-ventral pathways and their influence on their functional interactions.

Key words: visual object representation, interaction between the dorsal and ventral pathways, invariant visual information processing of objects, adaptive visual information processing of objects