Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Jul 20;107(29):13105-10. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1002870107. Epub 2010 Jul 1.
We addressed the question of how we locate and identify objects in complex natural environments by simultaneously recording single neurons from two brain regions that play different roles in this familiar activity--the frontal eye field (FEF), an area in the prefrontal cortex that is involved in visual spatial selection, and the inferotemporal cortex (IT), which is involved in object recognition--in monkeys performing a covert visual search task. Although the monkeys reported object identity, not location, neural activity specifying target location was evident in FEF before neural activity specifying target identity in IT. These two distinct processes were temporally correlated implying a functional linkage between the end stages of "where" and "what" visual processing and indicating that spatial selection is necessary for the formation of complex object representations associated with visual perception.
我们通过同时记录两只在这个熟悉的活动中扮演不同角色的大脑区域的单个神经元来解决如何在复杂的自然环境中定位和识别物体的问题，这两个区域分别是：额眼区（FEF），这是前额皮质中的一个区域，涉及视觉空间选择；以及下颞叶皮层（IT），它涉及物体识别——在猴子执行隐蔽视觉搜索任务时。尽管猴子报告的是目标的身份，而不是位置，但在 IT 中指定目标身份的神经活动之前，FEF 中就已经出现了指定目标位置的神经活动。这两个不同的过程在时间上是相关的，这表明“何处”和“何物”视觉处理的末端阶段之间存在功能联系，并表明空间选择对于与视觉感知相关的复杂物体表示的形成是必要的。
