DiCarlo James J, Cox David D
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2007 Aug;11(8):333-41. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.06.010. Epub 2007 Jul 16.
Despite tremendous variation in the appearance of visual objects, primates can recognize a multitude of objects, each in a fraction of a second, with no apparent effort. However, the brain mechanisms that enable this fundamental ability are not understood. Drawing on ideas from neurophysiology and computation, we present a graphical perspective on the key computational challenges of object recognition, and argue that the format of neuronal population representation and a property that we term 'object tangling' are central. We use this perspective to show that the primate ventral visual processing stream achieves a particularly effective solution in which single-neuron invariance is not the goal. Finally, we speculate on the key neuronal mechanisms that could enable this solution, which, if understood, would have far-reaching implications for cognitive neuroscience.
尽管视觉对象的外观存在巨大差异，但灵长类动物能够在不到一秒的时间内轻松识别众多对象。然而，目前尚不清楚促成这种基本能力的大脑机制。借鉴神经生理学和计算学的观点，我们从图形角度阐述了对象识别的关键计算挑战，并认为神经元群体表征的形式以及我们称之为“对象纠缠”的属性至关重要。我们利用这一观点表明，灵长类动物的腹侧视觉处理流实现了一种特别有效的解决方案，其中单个神经元的不变性并非目标。最后，我们推测了可能促成这种解决方案的关键神经元机制，若能理解这些机制，将对认知神经科学产生深远影响。
