RAPID VISUAL LEARNING IN NEURONS OF THE PRIMATE TEMPORAL VISUAL-CORTEX

THE human visual system can learn to recognize visual stimuli rapidly. For example, humans can accurately reconstruct meaningful objects out of fragmentary evidence, once they have seen the same object in its u nambiguous form. The anterior temporal cortical areas of macaques cont ain some neurones with invariant visual responses which appear to prov ide a representation of complex patterns and objects, such as faces. R emarkably, these neurones show an enhancement of response after brief (e.g. 5 s) exposure to the unambiguous stimulus, an effect that appear s to reflect the neural basis of the rapid perceptual learning seen in humans.