Cover Picture: The problems of comparing response patterns across visual areas, symbolically illustrated using a Reutersvärd Triangle. Visual areas in the macaque monkey are organized in a well-defined anatomical hierarchy (background, adapted from the article by Felleman and Van Essen in the inaugural issue of Cerebral Cortex). Areas V1, V2, and V4 belong to respectively higher levels of this anatomical hierarchy. But surprisingly, the responses in these areas to selected shape stimuli (icons on the cubes) do not follow a comparable hierarchical pattern. Indeed, different comparisons of the functional properties of the three areas lead to somewhat different conclusions, depending on the particular response metric (individual cubes) one chooses to focus on. See Hegdé and Van Essen, pp. 1100–1116.
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