WIKIMEDIA, ALFONZOPAZPHOTOOur brains quickly characterize everything we see as familiar or new, and scientists have been investigating this connection between vision and cognition for years. Now, research in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) reveals that the activation of neurons in a part of the primate brain called the perirhinal cortex can cause monkeys to recognize new objects as familiar and vice versa. The study was published today (August 17) in Science.
“There are a lot of really exciting aspects to this paper,” says neuroscientist David Sheinberg of Brown University, who did not participate in the work. “This group continues to make advances that are helping us understand how we convert visual impressions into things we know.”
Primate brains process visual information through several brain structures that make up the ventral visual stream. The last stop in this stream is the perirhinal cortex, part of the medial temporal lobe. Scientists know that this brain structure plays roles in visual memory and object discrimination. But one open question is whether the perirhinal cortex represents objects’ physical traits or whether it might also communicate information about nonphysical attributes, such as whether an object has been seen before.
“In the ...
