Vogels R, Sáry G, Orban G A
Laboratorium voor Neuro-en Psychofysiologie, KULeuven, Belgium.
Vis Neurosci. 1995 Mar-Apr;12(2):207-14. doi: 10.1017/s0952523800007884.
The responses of inferior temporal (IT) neurons may depend on the behavioral context of the stimuli; e.g. in Konorski tasks responses to two successively presented physically identical stimuli can be markedly different. This effect has been interpreted as being linked to the behavioral task, and to be involved in short-term memory and/or the temporal comparison of successively presented stimuli. We tested whether this behavioral context effect also occurs when the monkey is not executing a Konorski task, i.e. no temporal comparison of stimuli is being performed. Responses of the same IT neurons under two behavioral conditions were compared using the same temporal stimulus sequence (but different stimuli): a Konorski task and a Fixation task. We found that the occurrence of the behavioral context effect did not depend on the execution of the short-term memory task. The observed decline in the level of responses to repeated presentation of similar stimuli is interpreted as being a passive mechanism involved in recency detection, which occurs even if the recency information is not useful for the task. The importance of these results in the interpretation of "task-related" neuronal responses is discussed.
颞下（IT）神经元的反应可能取决于刺激的行为背景；例如，在科诺尔斯基任务中，对两个相继呈现的物理上相同的刺激的反应可能会明显不同。这种效应被解释为与行为任务有关，并参与短期记忆和/或对相继呈现的刺激的时间比较。我们测试了在猴子不执行科诺尔斯基任务时，即不进行刺激的时间比较时，这种行为背景效应是否也会出现。使用相同的时间刺激序列（但不同的刺激）比较了同一IT神经元在两种行为条件下的反应：科诺尔斯基任务和注视任务。我们发现行为背景效应的出现并不取决于短期记忆任务的执行。对相似刺激重复呈现时反应水平的下降被解释为一种参与新近性检测的被动机制，即使新近性信息对任务无用，这种机制也会发生。讨论了这些结果在解释“与任务相关”的神经元反应中的重要性。
