Tanifuji Manabu, Tsunoda Kazushige, Yamane Yukako
Laboratory for Integrative Neural Systems, Brain Science Institute, The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Hirosawa 2-1, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
Novartis Found Symp. 2006;270:217-25; discussion 226-37.
The ventral visual pathway is essential for object recognition where features necessary for recognition are extracted from object images. This pathway is not directly related to action; nevertheless extraction of features from object images through this pathway is closely related to actions since we determine our behaviour based on sensory information, such as object images in the scene. To link perception and action, we have investigated neural representation of object images in area TE. Area TE, the anterior part of the inferior temporal (IT) cortex, is the final purely visual area in the ventral visual pathway. Since individual neurons in this area respond to features less complex than object images, an object image is supposed to be represented by multiple features. Here, to investigate sets of features necessary for representation of object images, we conducted a combination study of an optical imaging technique and single cellular recordings from anesthetized macaque monkeys.
腹侧视觉通路对于物体识别至关重要，在该通路中，识别所需的特征从物体图像中被提取出来。这条通路与动作并无直接关联；然而，通过这条通路从物体图像中提取特征却与动作密切相关，因为我们基于感官信息（例如场景中的物体图像）来决定自己的行为。为了将感知与动作联系起来，我们研究了颞下回（IT）皮质前部的颞叶（TE）区域中物体图像的神经表征。TE区域是腹侧视觉通路中最后一个纯粹的视觉区域。由于该区域中的单个神经元对不如物体图像复杂的特征做出反应，所以一个物体图像应该由多个特征来表征。在此，为了研究表征物体图像所需的特征集，我们对麻醉后的猕猴进行了光学成像技术与单细胞记录的联合研究。
