TY - JOUR
T1 - Dissociation between local field potentials and spiking activity in macaque inferior temporal cortex reveals diagnosticity-based encoding of complex objects
AU - Nielsen, Kristina J.
AU - Logothetis, Nikos K.
AU - Rainer, Gregor
PY - 2006/9/20
Y1 - 2006/9/20
N2 - Neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex respond selectively to complex objects, and maintain their selectivity despite partial occlusion. However, relatively little is known about how the occlusion of different shape parts influences responses in the IT cortex. Here, we determine experimentally which parts of complex objects monkeys are relying on in a discrimination task. We then study the effect of occlusion of parts with different behavioral relevance on neural responses in the IT cortex at the level of spiking activity and local field potentials (LFPs). For both spiking activity and LFPs, we found that the diagnostic object parts, which were important for behavioral judgments, were preferentially represented in the IT cortex. Our data show that the effects of diagnosticity grew systematically stronger along a posterior-anterior axis for LFPs, but were evenly distributed for single units, suggesting that diagnosticity is first encoded in the posterior IT cortex. Our findings highlight the power of combined analysis of field potentials and spiking activity for mapping structure to computational function in the brain.
AB - Neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex respond selectively to complex objects, and maintain their selectivity despite partial occlusion. However, relatively little is known about how the occlusion of different shape parts influences responses in the IT cortex. Here, we determine experimentally which parts of complex objects monkeys are relying on in a discrimination task. We then study the effect of occlusion of parts with different behavioral relevance on neural responses in the IT cortex at the level of spiking activity and local field potentials (LFPs). For both spiking activity and LFPs, we found that the diagnostic object parts, which were important for behavioral judgments, were preferentially represented in the IT cortex. Our data show that the effects of diagnosticity grew systematically stronger along a posterior-anterior axis for LFPs, but were evenly distributed for single units, suggesting that diagnosticity is first encoded in the posterior IT cortex. Our findings highlight the power of combined analysis of field potentials and spiking activity for mapping structure to computational function in the brain.
KW - Behavior
KW - Electrophysiology
KW - Monkey
KW - Object recognition
KW - Psychophysics
KW - Visual cognition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33748904178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=33748904178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2273-06.2006
DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2273-06.2006
M3 - Article
C2 - 16988034
AN - SCOPUS:33748904178
SN - 0270-6474
VL - 26
SP - 9639
EP - 9645
JO - Journal of Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Neuroscience
IS - 38
ER -