Cognitive Systems Laboratory, Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence (CIPCE), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Sci Rep. 2022 May 23;12(1):8628. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-12236-y.
Rapid categorization of visual objects is critical for comprehending our complex visual world. The role of individual cortical neurons and neural populations in categorizing visual objects during passive vision has previously been studied. However, it is unclear whether and how perceptually guided behaviors affect the encoding of stimulus categories by neural population activity in the higher visual cortex. Here we studied the activity of the inferior temporal (IT) cortical neurons in macaque monkeys during both passive viewing and categorization of ambiguous body and object images. We found enhanced category information in the IT neural population activity during the correct, but not wrong, trials of the categorization task compared to the passive task. This encoding enhancement was task difficulty dependent with progressively larger values in trials with more ambiguous stimuli. Enhancement of IT neural population information for behaviorally relevant stimulus features suggests IT neural networks' involvement in perceptual decision-making behavior.
快速对视觉对象进行分类对于理解我们复杂的视觉世界至关重要。在被动视觉期间，个体皮质神经元和神经元群体在对视觉对象进行分类中的作用先前已经过研究。但是，尚不清楚感知引导的行为是否以及如何影响高级视觉皮层中神经群体活动对刺激类别的编码。在这里，我们在恒河猴中研究了下颞（IT）皮质神经元在被动观看和对模棱两可的身体和物体图像进行分类期间的活动。与被动任务相比，我们发现，在分类任务的正确而非错误试验中，IT 神经元群体活动中的类别信息得到了增强。与更具歧义的刺激相比，这种编码增强与任务难度有关，随着试验次数的增加，其值也越来越大。对与行为相关的刺激特征的 IT 神经元群体信息的增强表明，IT 神经网络参与了感知决策行为。
