Expectation-dependent stimulus selectivity in the ventral visual cortical pathway.

ABSTRACT: The hierarchical view of the ventral object recognition pathway is primarily based on feedforward mechanisms, starting from a fixed basis set of object primitives and ending on a representation of whole objects in the inferotemporal cortex. Here, we provide a different view. Rather than being a fixed "labeled line" for a specific feature, neurons are continually changing their stimulus selectivities on a moment-to-moment basis, as dictated by top-down influences of object expectation and perceptual task. Here, we also derive the selectivity for stimulus features from an ethologically curated stimulus set, based on a delayed match-to-sample task, that finds components that are informative for object recognition in addition to full objects, though the top-down effects were seen for both info

SUBMITTER: Altavini TS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12002251 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature