Topic: face selective neurons

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