Neural mechanism for extracting object features critical for visual categorization task

Abstract

The ability to group visual stimuli into meaningful categories is a fundamental cognitive process. Some experiments are made to investigate the neural mechanism of visual categorization. Although experimental evidence is known that prefrontal cortex (PFC) and inferiortemporal (IT) cortex neurons sensitively respond in categorization task, little is known about the functional role of interaction between PFC and IT in categorization task To address this issue, we propose a functional model of visual system, and investigate the neural mechanism for the categorization task of line drawings of faces. We show here that IT represents similarity of face images based on the information of the resolution maps of early visual stages. We show also that PFC neurons bind the information of part and location of the face image, and then PFC generates a working memory state, in which only the information of face features relevant to the categorization task are sustained. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.