Visual response properties of cells in the ventral and dorsal parts of the macaque inferotemporal cortex

Abstract

We recorded from cells in the anterio-ventral (TEav) and anterio- dorsal (TEad) parts of area TE of the inferotemporal cortex and examined their responses to a set of 100 visual stimuli in awake, fixating monkeys. In both TEav and TEad we found that, depending on the stimulus, the time course of responses varied considerably within individual cells and that there were three main factors in the variation. One factor is variance in the balance between the initial transient part of responses around 130 ms after stimulus onset and the later part after 240 ms from stimulus onset. The later parts of responses were more stimulus selective. The second factor is variance in the latency of response onset and peak and the third is variance in the speed of decay from the peak within the initial part of the responses. Stronger responses had shorter onset and peak latencies and longer decay times. The results suggest that stimulus images can be discriminated very rapidly in TEav and TEad by detecting differences in response onset. TEav cells differed from TEad cells in that they were more difficult to activate than TEad cells: the proportion of responsive TEav cells was smaller, the maximal responses of individual cells were smaller than in TEad and the number of stimuli that evoked significant responses in individual responsive cells was also smaller than in TEad. Moreover, TEav cells, overall, responded more strongly to more colorful object images than less colorful ones, while TEad cells did not show such a tendency. However, the minimum onset latency of individual cells and the sharpness of stimulus selectivity did not differ significantly between TEav and TEad. Responses of TEav cells are as selective as those of TEad cells, although there remains a possibility that the domain of selectivity differs between the two areas. These results support an earlier anatomical finding that TEav and TEad are located at the same hierarchical level of separate serial pathways rather than at successive stages of a single pathway.