Cognitive, Behavioral, and Systems NeuroscienceResearch PaperNeurons responsive to face-view in the primate ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
Highlights
▶Single cell recordings in the awake behaving primate ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to face stimuli differing in gaze/head orientation. ▶Single cells show changes in their neuronal response to different gaze directions. ▶Neurons selective for forward gaze also respond to auditory stimuli. ▶Ventrolateral prefrontal neurons are multisensory and support the notion that this area is involved in communication in the primate brain.
Section snippets
Surgery and electrophysiological recording
We recorded auditory and visual responsive cells in the prefrontal cortex of three naïve rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) that had not yet been tested with combined face and vocalization stimuli. All methods were in accordance with NIH Guidelines for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the Yale Animal Care and Use Committee Guidelines or the University of Rochester committee on Animal Care and Use. The recording methods have been previously described (Romanski et al., 2005, Sugihara et
General
We examined the response of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex neurons in rhesus macaques as they performed a fixation task for juice reward while presented with auditory or visual stimulus during fixation. During recordings each neuron was first tested with an array of 10 visual stimuli (including objects, faces, and patterns), 10 auditory stimuli (including vocalizations, noise bursts, and other sounds), and the face-view stimulus array (Fig. 1), as described above. Of 301 isolated cells in the
Discussion
In the present study, we have shown that single neurons in the macaque ventral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) respond differentially to changes in face-view/head orientation. Neurons in the VLPFC responded selectively to either the identity of the face presented (human or macaque) or to the view of the face/head, or to both identity and face-view. Neurons which were affected by the identity of the face most often showed an increase in firing in the second part of the stimulus period. Neurons that
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance: M. Pappy, J. Coburn, D. Shannon, and C. Louie for histology; M. Diltz for assistance with figures and comments on the manuscript; and C. Constantinidis for comments on the manuscript.
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2015, Neuroscience ResearchCitation Excerpt :In fact, de-correlation, which increases the amount of information carried by a pool of neurons, at least in the context of the tasks used by these studies, could be even more important given the smaller number of cells that are involved in neural processes in the marmoset. Although the general sources of cortical projections to MT are similar across primates, current evidence suggests that marmoset MT is connected to a greater proportion of the cortex than macaque MT. The extents of the frontal projections are also more extensive, including putative homologues of areas which, in the macaque are usually associated with higher-order multimodal processing, including integration of sensory inputs for social signals and individual identification (e.g. Romanski and Diehl, 2011; Yeterian et al., 2012). The interconnections with the ventral stream also appear to be more abundant than those observed in the macaque.