Hung C*, Kreiman G*, Pogio T, Dicarlo J

Fast Readout of Object Identity from Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex

Science (2005), 310:863-866 PDF

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Understanding the brain computations leading to object recognition requires quantitative characterization of the information represented in inferior temporal cortex (IT). We used a biologically plausible, classifier-based read-out technique to investigate the neural coding of selectivity and invariance at the IT population level. The activity of small neuronal populations (~100 randomly selected cells) over very short time intervals (as small as 12.5 ms) contained surprisingly accurate and robust information about both object 'identity' and 'category'. This information generalized over a range of object positions and scales, even for novel objects. Coarse information about position and scale could also be read-out from the same population.