Topic: mesopallium ventrolaterale

Mammals evolved a highly structured neocortex, composed of six cellular layers that are organized in functional columns. At first sight, the avian forebrain lacks a structured neocortex. However, the microstructural level of the avian sensory forebrain exhibits remarkable anatomical similarities to the mammalian brain organization. This study focuses on investigating the functional properties of three avian visual forebrain structures, to determine whether both taxa share a common functional neural circuitry, despite apparent anatomical differences. We conducted multi-channel electrophysiologi

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