Topic: categorical representations

Despite the diversity of neural responses, the brain is highly structured both at anatomical and functional levels. Neurons in different brain areas exhibit different response profiles (large-scale anatomical organization), and within brain areas, the neurons can sometimes be grouped together into specialized subpopulations (categorical representations). Organization can also be found at the level of the representational geometry in the activity space, typically in the form of low-dimensional structure (e.g. disentangled abstract representations). However, it is unclear how the geometry in the

Spatial locations can be encoded and maintained in working memory using high-precision, fine-grained representations that are cognitively demanding, or coarse and less demanding categorical representations. In this study, we employed an individual differences approach to identify brain activity correlates of the use of fine-grained and categorical representations in spatial working memory. We combined data from six fMRI studies, resulting in a sample of 158 (78 women, 25 ± 6 years) healthy participants performing a spatial working memory task. Our results showed that individual differences in

The identification of a conspecific is an ecologically relevant task. In primates, face selective neurons are found in the inferior temporal cortex, a region along the ventral visual pathway that displays complex feature coding. However, studies that characterized the avian equivalent to the ventral visual pathway (tectofugal pathway), using images as stimuli, found no evidence of complex feature coding nor conspecific face selectivity. In this study, we used a set of naturalistic videos with controlled lower-level features to assess if the pigeon’s tectofugal pathway encode categorical repres