Plato's Cave: Tanaka
Tanaka (1994)
Working with experimental monkeys, Tanaka mapped feature detectors in
higher cortical areas such as the inferiotemporal cortex using a
paradigm such as this: while recording from a cell in the
inferiotemporal cortex, he found a cell which responded when a picture
of a tiger (a natural enemy of this monkey) was flashed in front of
the monkey's eyes. Tanaka then progressively simplified the picture,
as shown below, testing each time to make sure that the cell was still
responding to the simplified stimulus. At some stage the cell would
no longer respond, in this example when the three boxes were
decomposed into either a pair of black boxes, or a single white box.
This suggests that this particular cell is tuned to a feature
consisting of a large light region together with two smaller dark
regions.
Using this paradigm Tanaka identified feature cells in a block of the
inferiotemporal cortex, and his findings for one such block are
summarized in the figure above.
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