Perception and memory: Action and interaction

Receptive field properties of neurons in, and the effects of cortical ablation of, inferior regions of the macaque temporal lobe reveal their role in the visual representation of objects. However, changes in receptive field properties, as a result of visual experience with specific objects or patterns, suggest that cells encode both sensory and mnemonic features of a visual stimulus. Thus, in addition to selectivity for the visual qualities of a stimulus, response properties of cells indicate their involvement with mechanisms of visual associative and visual recognition memory. Recently, ablation studies have extended the putative role of these neurons in memory. These results suggest that the anterior inferotemporal cortex not only plays a role in recognition memory by signaling novelty or familarity and in coding for visual associative memory but also modifies responses of neurons to the stimuli themselves, playing a part in the visual learning that underlies sensory classification of complex visual discriminanda.