Effects of complex background scene on object selectivity of single-unit activities in the macaque inferior temporal cortex M Mukai1, Y Yamane1, J Ito2, S Gruen2, H Tamura1 |
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1Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Japan |
| The inferior temporal (IT) cortex is a higher visual area that is crucial for visual object recognition. Studies of IT neurons have been focused on responses to isolated objects presented on a plain background. However, because objects in realistic conditions are placed in complex background scenes and receptive fields of IT neurons are large, object representation of IT neurons may involve interactions between objects and their background. We investigated whether and how the presence of a complex background scene affects the responses of IT neurons to object images. We prepared 448 images (64 objects on 6 natural-scene and a plain backgrounds) as visual stimuli. The spiking activities of IT neurons were recorded from analgesized and immobilized monkeys (Macaca fuscata). We identified 75 visually responsive neurons out of 110 recorded neurons, but 63 of these 75 neurons were responsive only when the objects were on particular backgrounds, indicating that the presence of complex background scene affects the responsiveness of IT neurons to the objects. For those neurons that were visually responsive for multiple background scenes, their object preference was preserved across different background scenes. These response properties of IT neurons are suitable for the invariant recognition of objects across different backgrounds. |
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