Selectivity and invariance for visual object perception.

The sight of an object triggers a complex set of processes in the brain. Although it is already well established that object perception is performed by a hierarchical network, the so-called ventral visual pathway, we are only starting to understand how neurons along this pathway encode visual information at each processing stage. In this review, we discuss basic principles of neural coding for object perception and describe evidence showing that it mainly relies on two principles: selectivity and invariance.