Mehrpour, V. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

Pinpointing the neural signatures of single-exposure visual familiarity

Memories of the images that we have seen are thought to be reflected in the reduction of neural responses in high-level visual areas such as inferotemporal (IT) cortex, a phenomenon known as repetition suppression (RS). We challenged this hypothesis with a task that required rhesus monkeys to report whether images were novel or repeated while ignoring variations in contrast, a stimulus attribute that is also known to modulate the overall IT response. The monkeys behavior was largely contrast-invariant, contrary to the predictions of an RS-inspired decoder, which could not distinguish responses to images that are repeated from those of lower contrast. However, the monkeys behavioral patterns were well-predicted by a linearly decodable variant in which the total spike count was corrected for contrast modulation. These results suggest that the IT neural activity pattern that best aligns with single-exposure visual recognition memory behavior is not RS but rather "sensory referenced suppression (SRS)": reductions in IT population response magnitude, corrected for sensory modulation. Significance statementMemories of whether an image has been seen before are reflected in high-level visual cortex as "sensory referenced suppression (SRS)": reductions in population response magnitude, corrected for sensory modulation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

A neural correlate of image memorability

Some images are easy to remember while others are easily forgotten. While variation in image memorability is consistent across individuals, we lack a full account of its neural correlates. By analyzing data collected from inferotemporal cortex (IT) as monkeys performed a visual memory task, we demonstrate that a simple property of the visual encoding of an image, its population response magnitude, is strongly correlated with its memorability. These results establish a novel behavioral role for the magnitude of the IT response, which lies largely orthogonal to the coding scheme that IT uses to represent object identity. To investigate the origin of IT memorability modulation, we also probed convolutional neural network models trained to categorize objects. We found brain-analogous correlates of memorability that grew in strength across the hierarchy of these networks, suggesting that this memorability correlate is likely to arise from the optimizations required for visual as opposed to mnemonic processing.

neuroscience↗