987 pixels/inch and subtended a visual angle of 8°. The stimulus MAPK inhibitor set was not corrected for luminance or spatial frequency. Subjects were thoroughly briefed before the experiment to avoid any verbal communication during the real-time fMRI run. Video recordings of all experimental conditions were shown and the task was verbally explained by the experimenter with the help of these videos. No instructions were given to maintain a specific gaze direction. Subjects were allowed to

close their eyes during the 12-s rest periods between blocks/trials, but were instructed to open their eyes a few seconds before this rest period was over. The experiment consisted of two phases: a training phase (also called localizer) in which a classifier was trained on the cortical activity patterns induced by faces and places; and a test phase in which the classifier was used to decode the category of the attended picture in a hybrid of a simultaneously presented face and place. The training phase consisted of 15 × 30-s blocks of face BIBW2992 pictures interleaved with 15 × 30-s blocks of place pictures

with 12 s rest intervals between consecutive blocks. Within each block, 15 pictures were presented, and the first picture was repeated at a random position in the block. Subjects had to press a button on a button box with their right index finger when they saw the first picture repeated in that block. This kept them actively engaged in the task throughout the training phase. Early repeats of the first picture were avoided by constraining it to repeat after three other pictures had been presented. Subjects were advised Ibrutinib to attend to all pictures in a block regardless of when the first picture was repeated. Each picture within a block was presented for 1.5 s followed by a 0.5-s fixation period, as shown in Fig. 1A. All 14 pictures in each block were unique and used nowhere else in the experiment. The entire training phase took 22 min

to complete. In the test phase, 15 hand-picked pairs of transparently overlapped faces and places were used (see Figs S1, S2 and Movie S1), and subjects had to attend to either face or place items depending on the cue. Thirty trials were collected in the non-feedback condition, half of which had face as target (attend-face trials) and the remaining half of which had place as target (attend-place trials). Every trial started with presentation of the target and non-target cue pictures for 1.75 s each, followed by a 0.5-s fixation period. Cue pictures were labeled with either of the words ‘Target’ and ‘Non-target’, and the order of presentation of these cues was counterbalanced across subjects. After cueing, a hybrid image of the target and non-target picture was shown for 12 repetition times (TRs), and subjects had to attend to the target picture while ignoring the non-target picture (Fig. 1C and D).