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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on October 30, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp227
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Color Selectivity of Neurons in the Posterior Inferior Temporal Cortex of the Macaque Monkey

Masaharu Yasuda1,2,3, Taku Banno1,2 and Hidehiko Komatsu1,2

1 Division of Sensory and Cognitive Information, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Myodaiji, Okazaki 444-8585, Japan, 2 Department of Physiological Sciences, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Myodaiji, Okazaki 444-8585, Japan

Address correspondence to Hidehiko Komatsu, PhD, Division of Sensory and Cognitive Information, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Myodaiji, Okazaki 444-8585, Japan. Email: komatsu{at}nips.ac.jp.

We recorded the activities of neurons in the lateral surface of the posterior inferior temporal cortex (PIT) of 3 hemispheres of 3 monkeys performing a visual fixation task. We characterized the color and shape selectivities of each neuron, mapped its receptive field (RF), and studied the distributions of these response properties. Using a set of color stimuli that were systematically distributed in Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage-xy chromaticity diagram, we found numerous color-selective neurons distributed throughout the area examined. Neurons in the ventral region tended to have sharper color tuning than those in the dorsal region. We also found a crude retinotopic organization in the ventral region. Within the ventral region of PIT, neurons in the dorsal part had RFs that overlapped the foveal center; the eccentricity of RFs increased in the more ventral part, and neurons in the anterior and posterior parts had RFs that represented the lower and upper visual fields, respectively. In all 3 hemispheres, the region where sharply tuned color-selective neurons were concentrated was confined within this retinotopic map. These findings suggest that PIT is a heterogeneous area and that there is a circumscribed region within it that has crude retinotopic organization and is involved in the processing of color.

Key Words: color • inferior temporal cortex • primate • retinotopy • TEO • visual cortex

3 Current address: Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892-2235, USA


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