  It is a fundamental behavior that different individuals see the world in a
largely similar manner. This is an essential basis for humans' ability to
cooperate and communicate. However, what are the neuronal properties that
underlie these inter-subject commonalities of our visual world? Finding out
what aspects of neuronal coding remain invariant across individuals' brains
will shed light not only on this fundamental question but will also point to
the neuronal coding scheme as the basis of visual perception. Here, we address
this question by obtaining intracranial recordings from three cohorts of
patients taking part in a different visual recognition task (overall 19
patients and 244 high-order visual contacts included in the analyses) and
examining the neuronal coding scheme most consistent across individuals' visual
cortex. Our results highlight relational coding - expressed by the set of
similarity distances between profiles of pattern activations - as the most
consistent representation across individuals. Alternative coding schemes, such
as population vector coding or linear coding, failed to achieve similar
inter-subject consistency. Our results thus support relational coding as the
central neuronal code underlying individuals' shared perceptual content in the
human brain.
