Booth M C, Rolls E T
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK.
Cereb Cortex. 1998 Sep;8(6):510-23. doi: 10.1093/cercor/8.6.510.
A view-invariant representation of objects in the brain would have many computational advantages. Here we describe a population of single neurons in the temporal visual cortex (IT) that have view-invariant representations of familiar objects. Ten real plastic objects were placed in the monkeys' home cages for a period of time before neurophysiological experiments in which neuronal responses were measured to four views of each object. The macaques performed a visual fixation task, and had never been trained in object discrimination. The majority of the visual neurons recorded were responsive to some views of some objects and/or to the control stimuli, as would be expected from previous studies. However, a small subset of these neurons were responsive to all views of one or more of the objects, providing evidence that these neurons were coding for objects, rather than simply for individual views or visual features within the image. This result was confirmed by information theoretic analyses, which showed that the neurons provided information about which object was being seen, independently of the view. The coding scheme was shown to be sparse distributed, with relatively independent information being provided by the different neurons. Hypotheses about how these view-invariant cells are formed are described.
大脑中物体的视图不变表示具有许多计算优势。在这里，我们描述了颞叶视觉皮层（IT）中的一群单个神经元，它们具有熟悉物体的视图不变表示。在神经生理学实验之前，将十个真实的塑料物体放在猴子的笼子里一段时间，在该实验中测量神经元对每个物体的四个视图的反应。猕猴执行视觉固定任务，并且从未接受过物体辨别训练。如先前研究预期的那样，记录的大多数视觉神经元对某些物体的某些视图和/或对照刺激有反应。然而，这些神经元中的一小部分对一个或多个物体的所有视图都有反应，这提供了证据表明这些神经元编码的是物体，而不是简单地编码图像中的单个视图或视觉特征。信息理论分析证实了这一结果，该分析表明神经元提供了与所看到的物体相关的信息，而与视图无关。编码方案显示为稀疏分布，不同的神经元提供相对独立的信息。文中还描述了关于这些视图不变细胞如何形成的假设。
