Spiking activity in the ventral visual pathway under delayed match-to-sample task

The hierarchical view of the ventral object recognition pathway is
primarily based on feedforward mechanisms, starting from a fixed basis set
of object primitives and ending on a representation of whole objects in
the inferotemporal cortex. Here we provide a different view. Rather than
being a fixed “labeled line” for a specific feature, neurons are
continually changing their stimulus selectivities on a moment-to-moment
basis, as dictated by top-down influences of object expectation and
perceptual task. Here we also derive the selectivity for stimulus features
from an ethologically curated stimulus set, based on a delayed
match-to-sample task, that finds components that are informative for
object recognition.