The neuronal machinery involved in successive orientation discrimination

Abstract

Following our strategy of using simple discrimination tasks to investigate the primate visual system, we trained both human and monkey subjects for two orientation discrimination tasks: an identification and a successive discrimination. Contrasting these two tasks allowed us to isolate the temporal comparison component and to relate this component to activity in right fusiform gyrus using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and to infero-temporal cortex using a lesion approach in monkeys. Single-cell recordings in infero-temporal cortex demonstrated that neurons in this region can contribute to the three processes underlying temporal comparison: (1) sensorial representation of visual stimuli, (2) maintaining a trace of the preceding stimulus, and (3) comparison of the incoming stimulus with that trace. By the same token, a comparison of these two tasks, which use the same input and the same attribute, demonstrates the task dependency of processing in the human and non-human primate visual system.