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Coding for visual categories in the human brain

Nature Neuroscience volume 3, pages 855–856 (2000)Cite this article

Single-neuron recordings in the human hippocampus, entorhinal cortex and amygdala demonstrate that cells in these areas can respond selectively to particular categories of visual stimuli.

For the last 50 years, the microelectrode has been one of the most powerful tools for revealing the neuronal bases of perception and cognition. Electrophysiology has identified individual neurons that respond selectively to highly complex and abstract visual stimuli. The first discovered and most intensively studied are the ‘face-selective’ neurons in inferior temporal (IT) cortex of the macaque monkey1. Face-selective cells, which are a small proportion of IT cells, respond best or only to the sight of faces. Although virtually all faces activate these cells, different faces produce varying response magnitudes. Thus, the response of one such cell cannot represent a specific face, but the pattern of firing across a set of face-selective cells would be unique for a particular face. As these cells usually do not code for individual faces, they are best described as ‘face-category’ cells. The brain may represent individual faces by the pattern of activity over a population of such face-category cells, in what is termed population or coarse coding2,3.

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Figure 1: Examples from three of the nine categories of visual stimuli used by Kreiman and colleagues4.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, 08544, New Jersey, USA

    Charles G. Gross

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Gross, C. Coding for visual categories in the human brain. Nat Neurosci 3, 855–856 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/78745

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