SPATIOTEMPORAL INFLUENCES AT THE NEURAL LEVEL OF OBJECT RECOGNITION

In late 1988, Miyashita published work reporting recordings of single cells in the inferotemporal cortex of the macaque monkey (Miyashita 19 88 Nature 335 817-20). He described the responses of neurons to a sequ ence of random fractal pattern images, and how many of the neurons tes ted were seen to respond strongly to a subset of the images on the bas is of sequence presentation order, i.e. appearance in time, rather tha n their spatial similarity. In this work, I describe a local, Hebb-lik e learning rule which in conjunction with a simple feedforward neural architecture is capable of replicating the type of temporal-order asso ciation apparent in the cells from which he made recordings. The paper also advances reasons for requiring such learning by describing its p ossible role in establishing transformation invariant representations of objects.