RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Trade-Off between Object Selectivity and Tolerance in Monkey Inferotemporal Cortex
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 12292
OP 12307
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1897-07.2007
VO 27
IS 45
A1 Davide Zoccolan
A1 Minjoon Kouh
A1 Tomaso Poggio
A1 James J. DiCarlo
YR 2007
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/45/12292.abstract
AB Object recognition requires both selectivity among different objects and tolerance to vastly different retinal images of the same object, resulting from natural variation in (e.g.) position, size, illumination, and clutter. Thus, discovering neuronal responses that have object selectivity and tolerance to identity-preserving transformations is fundamental to understanding object recognition. Although selectivity and tolerance are found at the highest level of the primate ventral visual stream [the inferotemporal cortex (IT)], both properties are highly varied and poorly understood. If an IT neuron has very sharp selectivity for a unique combination of object features (“diagnostic features”), this might automatically endow it with high tolerance. However, this relationship cannot be taken as given; although some IT neurons are highly object selective and some are highly tolerant, the empirical connection of these key properties is unknown. In this study, we systematically measured both object selectivity and tolerance to different identity-preserving image transformations in the spiking responses of a population of monkey IT neurons. We found that IT neurons with high object selectivity typically have low tolerance (and vice versa), regardless of how object selectivity was quantified and the type of tolerance examined. The discovery of this trade-off illuminates object selectivity and tolerance in IT and unifies a range of previous, seemingly disparate results. This finding also argues against the idea that diagnostic conjunctions of features guarantee tolerance. Instead, it is naturally explained by object recognition models in which object selectivity is built through AND-like tuning mechanisms.