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Processing of shape by inferotemporal cortex neurons. Ichiro FUJITA 1 1Frontier Research Program, RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) pp.414-422
Published Date 1991/6/10
DOI https://doi.org/10.11477/mf.1431900142
  • Abstract
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 The inferotemporal cortex (IT) in the monkey is the final stage of a series of unimodal visual areas involved in object recognition. The first part of this article reviews what is known about physiology and anatomy of the IT. The second part then focuses on the question of how shape information is processed in the IT.

 The IT consists of two functionally different subareas, the posterior IT and the anterior IT. Neurons in the posterior IT have relatively small receptive fields. The size ranges from 1 to 5 degrees. These neurons respond well to slits, spots or edges. By contrast, neurons in the anterior IT have large receptive fields, ranging from 10 to more than 30 degrees. Except for a class of neurons selective to biologically significant stimuli such as faces and hands, the stimulus features essential to activate anterior IT neurons are “moderately complex”-neither as simple as slits, spots, edges, nor as complex as particular objects. For example, a neuron responds to a combination of two bars forming a “T-shape”, and another to a triangle filled with horizontal stripes. How can anterior IT neurons encode objects more complex than their “moderately complex” selectivities? Evidence is presented that the anterior IT may have a modular organization. In each module, neurons are selective to limited and overlapped ranges of the stimulus feature spectrum. An important aspect of the organization of the anterior IT is that the optimal feature or the degree of tuning is not identical, but slightly differs among the neurons within a module. All neurons within a module may respond to shapes and patterns which belong to the same “category”, but they are differentially activated by a particular stimulus in the category becasue of the difference in tuning to fine parameters. Activity patterns across a neuronal population within a module may thus be capable of representing complex stimulus features which singl eneurons cannot specify.


Copyright © 1991, Igaku-Shoin Ltd. All rights reserved.

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電子版ISSN 1882-1243 印刷版ISSN 0001-8724 医学書院

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