Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain (original) (raw)

Nature volume 435, pages 1102–1107 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

It takes a fraction of a second to recognize a person or an object even when seen under strikingly different conditions. How such a robust, high-level representation is achieved by neurons in the human brain is still unclear1,2,3,4,5,6. In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages of the ventral visual pathway respond to complex images such as faces and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties such as the stimulus size, position and viewing angle2,4,7,8,9,10,11,12. We have previously shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) fire selectively to images of faces, animals, objects or scenes13,14. Here we report on a remarkable subset of MTL neurons that are selectively activated by strikingly different pictures of given individuals, landmarks or objects and in some cases even by letter strings with their names. These results suggest an invariant, sparse and explicit code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual percepts into long-term and more abstract memories.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all patients for their participation; P. Sinha for drawing some faces; colleagues for providing pictures; I. Wainwright for administrative assistance; and E. Behnke, T. Fields, E. Ho, E. Isham, A. Kraskov, P. Steinmetz, I. Viskontas and C. Wilson for technical assistance. This work was supported by grants from the NINDS, NIMH, NSF, DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, the W.M. Keck Foundation Fund for Discovery in Basic Medical Research, a Whiteman fellowship (to G.K.), the Gordon Moore Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Swartz Foundation for Computational Neuroscience.

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  1. R. Quian Quiroga
    Present address: Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, 91125, USA
    R. Quian Quiroga, L. Reddy & C. Koch
  2. Division of Neurosurgery and Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California, (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, 90095, USA
    R. Quian Quiroga & I. Fried
  3. Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02142, USA
    G. Kreiman
  4. Functional Neurosurgery Unit, Tel-Aviv Medical Center and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 69978, Israel
    I. Fried

Authors

  1. R. Quian Quiroga
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  2. L. Reddy
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  3. G. Kreiman
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  4. C. Koch
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  5. I. Fried
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Correspondence toR. Quian Quiroga.

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This contains Supplementary Methods and Legends to accompany Supplementary Figures S1-11. (PDF 4435 kb)

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Quiroga, R., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G. et al. Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain.Nature 435, 1102–1107 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03687

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Editorial Summary

Stars in their eyes

It takes moments for the human brain to recognize a person or an object even if seen under very different conditions. This raises the question: can a single neuron respond selectively to a given face regardless of view, age, pose or context? That question — it has been called the search for the ‘grandmother neuron’ — is difficult to test. But now, in patients with intractable epilepsy who were implanted with depth electrodes for a clinical process, an answer has been obtained. Patients were asked to respond to images on computer screens, and the results showed that neurons are pretty single-minded in what they respond to. For instance, one neuron will respond selectively to different pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston, one to basketball player Michael Jordan, and another to different views of the Tower of Pisa.

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