PSYC 311 Chapter Notes - Chapter 19: Parahippocampal Gyrus, Temporal Lobe, Halle Berry

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 311
• Professor: Michalakis Petrides

Document Summary

Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages of the ventral vision stream respond to complex images such as faces and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties such as stimulus size, position, and viewing angle. There exists a remarkable subset of neurons in the medial temporal lobe (mtl) that are selectively activated by different pictures of the same individuals, objects, and landmarks. Interestingly, this neuron was also selectively activated by the letter string. Halle berry" --> such an invariant pattern goes beyond common visual features of different stimuli: a multi-neuron complex in the left anterior hippocampus responds to photographs of the sydney opera house. Also responded to the letter string sydney opera" but not to other strings such as eiffel tower". Out of the 14% of neurons that showed response to a particular visual stimulus, 38. 6% showed invariance to one particular individual.