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Representing "stuff" in visual cortex

C M Ziemba and J Freeman

Published in , pages 942--943. , Jan 2015.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1423496112

Despite decades of study, we do not understand the fundamental processes by which our brain encodes and represents incoming visual information and uses it to guide perception and action. A wealth of evidence suggests that visual recognition is mediated by a series of areas in primate cortex known as the ventral stream, including V1 (primary visual cortex), V2, and V4 (Fig. 1A) (1). The earliest stages are to some extent understood; Hubel and Wiesel famously discovered, for example, that neurons in V1 respond selectively to the orientation and direction of a moving edge (2). However, a vast gulf remains between coding for a simple edge and representing the full richness of our visual world. David Hubel himself observed in 2012 that we still "have almost no examples of neural structures in which we know the difference between the information coming in and what is going out -- what the structure is for. We have some idea of the answer for the retina, the lateral geniculate body, and the primary visual cortex, but that's about it" (3). In PNAS, Okazawa et al. (4) make significant headway in this quest by uncovering and characterizing a unique form of neural selectivity in area V4.
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