PSYC 311 Chapter Notes - Chapter Reading 20 - Post Midterm 7 - Grandmothers - Connor: Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Temporal Lobe

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

Document Summary

Grandmother cell is a coin termed by lettvin to parody the simplistic notion that the brain has a separate neuron to detect and represent every object (including your grandmother). Quiroga et. al describe a neuron in the human brain that looks for all the world like a jennifer aniston cell. A more technical term for the grandmother issue is sparseness . 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 for combinations of features that is, fewer neurons are activated by a given stimulus, although the code is still population based. Sparseness has its advantages, especially for memory, because compact coding maximizes total stage capacity. Furthermore, some evidence suggests that sparsification is a defining goal of visual information processing.