Fujita I, Tanaka K, Ito M, Cheng K
Laboratory for Neural Information Processing, RIKEN Institute, Saitama, Japan.
Nature. 1992 Nov 26;360(6402):343-6. doi: 10.1038/360343a0.
At early stages of the mammalian visual cortex, neurons with similar stimulus selectivities are vertically arrayed through the thickness of the cortical sheet and clustered in patches or bands across the surface. This organization, referred to as a 'column', has been found with respect to one-dimensional stimulus parameters such as orientation of stimulus contours, eye dominance of visual inputs, and direction of stimulus motion. It is unclear, however, whether information with extremely high dimensions, such as visual shape, is organized in a similar columnar fashion or in a different manner in the brain. Here we report that the anterior inferotemporal area of the monkey cortex, the final station of the visual cortical stream crucial for object recognition, consists of columns, each containing cells responsive to similar visual features of objects.
在哺乳动物视觉皮层的早期阶段，具有相似刺激选择性的神经元在皮层薄片的厚度方向上垂直排列，并在整个表面聚集成斑块或条带。这种组织形式，被称为“柱”，已在诸如刺激轮廓的方向、视觉输入的眼优势以及刺激运动方向等一维刺激参数方面被发现。然而，尚不清楚诸如视觉形状等具有极高维度的信息在大脑中是以类似的柱状方式组织，还是以不同的方式组织。在这里，我们报告称，猴子皮层的前颞下区域，即对物体识别至关重要的视觉皮层通路的最后一站，由柱组成，每个柱都包含对物体相似视觉特征有反应的细胞。
