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Science 4 November 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5749, pp. 863 - 866
DOI: 10.1126/science.1117593
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Reports

Fast Readout of Object Identity from Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex

Chou P. Hung,1,2,4*{dagger} Gabriel Kreiman,1,2,3,4* Tomaso Poggio,1,2,3,4 James J. DiCarlo1,2,4

Understanding the brain computations leading to object recognition requires quantitative characterization of the information represented in inferior temporal (IT) cortex. We used a biologically plausible, classifier-based readout technique to investigate the neural coding of selectivity and invariance at the IT population level. The activity of small neuronal populations (~100 randomly selected cells) over very short time intervals (as small as 12.5 milliseconds) contained unexpectedly accurate and robust information about both object "identity" and "category." This information generalized over a range of object positions and scales, even for novel objects. Coarse information about position and scale could also be read out from the same population.

1 McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
2 Center for Biological and Computational Learning, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
3 Computation and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBI) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
4 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

* These authors contributed equally to this work.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: chouhung{at}mit.edu

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