title: Emergence of transformation-tolerant representations of visual objects in rat lateral extrastriate cortex.
abstract: Rodents are emerging as increasingly popular models of visual functions. Yet, evidence that rodent visual cortex is capable of advanced visual processing, such as object recognition, is limited. Here we investigate how neurons located along the progression of extrastriate areas that, in the rat brain, run laterally to primary visual cortex, encode object information. We found a progressive functional specialization of neural responses along these areas, with: (1) a sharp reduction of the amount of low-level, energy-related visual information encoded by neuronal firing; and (2) a substantial increase in the ability of both single neurons and neuronal populations to support discrimination of visual objects under identity-preserving transformations (e.g., position and size changes). These findings strongly argue for the existence of a rat object-processing pathway, and point to the rodents as promising models to dissect the neuronal circuitry underlying transformation-tolerant recognition of visual objects.
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Sina
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-1926-0227
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tafazoli
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.|Laboratory of Neural Computation, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.|Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States.
authors.forename: Houman
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8609-7397
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Safaai
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Gioia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: De Franceschi
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Federica Bianca
authors.initials: FB
authors.lastname: Rosselli
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Walter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Vanzella
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Margherita
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Riggi
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Buffolo
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Neural Computation, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-1700-8909
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Panzeri
authors.affiliation: Visual Neuroscience Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
authors.forename: Davide
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-7221-4188
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zoccolan
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D051381:Rats; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: information theory; invariance; neuronal coding; neuroscience; object recognition; rat; transformation tolerance; visual cortex