Knowing a Ferrari from a Mustang from an image can be hard because one has to detect their unique features while ignoring large image variations due to changes in view, size, position etc. Successful recognition requires both object identity and image attributes to be represented efficiently but precisely how the brain does it has been unclear. Recent work from our lab has shown that single neurons in high-level visual areas combine these two signals by multiplying rather than adding them, and that doing so enables efficent decoding of both signals

Faculty: SP Arun, CNS

Publication: Ratan Murty NA & Arun SP, (2018), Multiplicative mixing of object identity and image attributes in single inferior temporal neurons., PNAS, in press