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Preferential encoding of visual categories in parietal cortex compared with prefrontal cortex

Nature Neuroscience volume 15, pages 315–320 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

The ability to recognize the behavioral relevance, or category membership, of sensory stimuli is critical for interpreting the meaning of events in our environment. Neurophysiological studies of visual categorization have found categorical representations of stimuli in prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area that is closely associated with cognitive and executive functions. Recent studies have also identified neuronal category signals in parietal areas that are typically associated with visual-spatial processing. It has been proposed that category-related signals in parietal cortex and other visual areas may result from 'top-down' feedback from PFC. We directly compared neuronal activity in the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area and PFC in monkeys performing a visual motion categorization task. We found that LIP showed stronger, more reliable and shorter latency category signals than PFC. These findings suggest that LIP is strongly involved in visual categorization and argue against the idea that parietal category signals arise as a result of feedback from PFC during this task.

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Figure 1: DMC task.
Figure 2: Examples of category-selective LIP and PFC neurons.
Figure 3: Strength of category selectivity across LIP and PFC populations.
Figure 4: Time course of LIP and PFC category selectivity.
Figure 5: Neuronal activity to on-boundary directions with ambiguous category membership.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. McClellan for animal training and technical assistance, G. Huang, C. Rishel and S. Thomas for technical assistance, and the staff of The University of Chicago Animal Resources Center for expert veterinary assistance. We also thank J. Assad, J. Fitzgerald, T. Herrington, G. Ibos, J. McKee, E. Miller, C. Pack, M. Riesenhuber and A. Sarma for helpful discussions and/or comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health grant R01 EY019041. Additional support was provided by a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Brain Research Foundation and US National Institutes of Health Training Grant 5T32GM007839.

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  1. Department of Neurobiology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Sruthi K Swaminathan & David J Freedman

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  1. Sruthi K Swaminathan
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  2. David J Freedman
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Contributions

D.J.F. and S.K.S. designed the experiments, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. S.K.S. trained the monkeys and performed all neurophysiological recordings. D.J.F. assisted in monkey training and neurophysiological recordings.

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Correspondence to David J Freedman.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Swaminathan, S., Freedman, D. Preferential encoding of visual categories in parietal cortex compared with prefrontal cortex. Nat Neurosci 15, 315–320 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3016

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