Macaque Ventral Visual Responses to Diverse Stimuli and during Natural Vision

Abstract

Studies of vision in the primate brain must contend with a gap between reductionist experiments and the rich context of natural behaviors. I explored the selectivity of macaque ventral visual neurons within a broad stimulus space, leveraging contemporary developments in deep generative image models. Further, I analyzed detailed neuron response properties during free-viewing behavior, developing novel statistical analysis methods and computational models. I found that high-level visual neurons in the inferior temporal cortex, previously thought to code for semantic categories, responded just as strongly to ineffable visual features. During task-free active viewing, neurons throughout the ventral visual pathway responded in ways that comported with the classical view of these neurons as reactive feature detectors. The results suggest that the ventral visual cortex specializes in encoding the present visual input in a category-general way, even during active behavior.