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Effects of task demands on the responses of color-selective neurons in the inferior temporal cortex

Nature Neuroscience volume 10, pages 108–116 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Categorization and fine discrimination are two different functions in visual perception, and we can switch between these two functions depending on the situation or task demands. To explore how visual cortical neurons behave in such situations, we recorded the activities of color-selective neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex of two monkeys trained to perform a color categorization task, a color discrimination task and a simple fixation task. Many IT neurons changed their activity depending upon the task, although color selectivity was well conserved. A majority of neurons showed stronger responses during the categorization task. Moreover, for the population of IT neurons as a whole, signals contributing to performing the categorization task were enhanced. These results imply that judgment of color category by color-selective IT neurons is facilitated during the categorization task and suppressed during the discrimination task as a consequence of task-dependent modulation of their activities.

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Figure 1: Experimental paradigm, visual stimuli, cortical area explored in this study and task performances.
Figure 2: Responses of two representative color-selective neurons that showed task dependency.
Figure 3: Distribution of the magnitudes of the task effect and the time course of the task dependency.
Figure 4: Triangular plot showing the relative strength of the neuronal activity during the fixation (top corner), categorization (bottom right corner) and discrimination (bottom left corner) tasks.
Figure 5: Red-green color selectivity in the categorization and discrimination tasks.
Figure 6: Stability of the color-selectivity of neurons that showed task-dependent differences in their response magnitudes.
Figure 7: Distribution of the categorization indices and comparison between tasks.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Ito and N. Goda for comments on the manuscript and M. Togawa for technical assistance. This work was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) and for Scientific Research on Priority Areas 〈System study on higher-order brain functions〉 (17022040) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Sensory and Cognitive Information, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Myodaiji, Okazaki, Aichi, 444-8585, Japan

    Kowa Koida & Hidehiko Komatsu

  2. Department of Physiological Sciences, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Myodaiji, Okazaki, 444-8585, Aichi, Japan

    Hidehiko Komatsu

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  1. Kowa Koida
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Correspondence to Hidehiko Komatsu.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Color selectivity and shape selectivity of the representative cells whose activities are shown in Figure 2. (PDF 18 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 2

Reproducibility of the task effect across separate blocks. (PDF 16 kb)

Supplementary Figure 3

Temporal profile of the task effect and color selectivity affecting the activities of all 124 neurons. (PDF 16 kb)

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Koida, K., Komatsu, H. Effects of task demands on the responses of color-selective neurons in the inferior temporal cortex. Nat Neurosci 10, 108–116 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1823

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