Subpopulations of neurons in the perirhinal cortex enable both modality-specific and modality-invariant recognition of objects

Abstract

The:perirhinal cortex (PER) supports multimodal object recognition, : but how multimodal information of objects is integrated within the PER remains unknown. Here, we recorded single units within the PER while rats performed a PER-dependent multimodal object-recognition task. In this task, audiovisual cues were presented simultaneously (multimodally) or separately (unimodally). We identified 2 types of object-selective neurons in the PER: crossmodal cells, showing constant firing patterns for an object irrespective of its modality, and unimodal cells, showing a preference for a specific modality. Unimodal cells further dissociated unimodal and multimodal versions of the object by modulating their firing rates according to the modality condition. A population-decoding analysis confirmed that the PER could perform both modality-invariant and modality-specific object decoding—the former for recognizing an object as the same in various conditions and the latter for remembering modality-specific experiences of the same object.