PSYC 311 Chapter Notes - Chapter 20: Visual Cortex, Geometric Transformation, Neural Coding

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

Document Summary

Grandmother cell" is the term coined to parody the simplistic notion that the brain has a separate neuron to detect and represent every object (including one"s grandmother: that is, the brain has a one-to-one object coding scheme. A more technical term for this so-called grandmother cell or jennifer anniston neuron is. At earlier stages in the brain"s object-representation pathway, the neural code for an object is a broad activity pattern distributed across a population of neurons, each responsive to some discrete visual feature. At later processing stages, neurons become increasingly selective and fewer neurons are activated by a given stimulus (the code becomes increasingly sparse). Sparse coding scheme: few neurons are active in the presence of a specific visual stimulus. Distributed coding scheme: many neurons are active in response to each stimulus. Invariant: different views of the same person or object evoke identical activity patterns. Not invariant: different views evoke different acivity patterns.