Abstract
When we perceive a visual object, we implicitly or explicitly associate it with an object category we know. Recent research has shown that the visual system can use local, informative image fragments of a given object, rather than the whole object, to classify it into a familiar category. We have previously reported, using human psychophysical studies, that when subjects learn new object categories using whole objects, they incidentally learn informative fragments, even when not required to do so. However, the neuronal mechanisms by which we acquire and use informative fragments, as well as category knowledge itself, have remained unclear. Here we describe the methods by which we adapted the relevant human psychophysical methods to awake, behaving monkeys and replicated key previous psychophysical results. This establishes awake, behaving monkeys as a useful system for future neurophysiological studies not only of informative fragments in particular, but also of object categorization and category learning in general.
Highlights
Visual object perception is inextricably linked to object categorization
The present study is important in two main respects. It provides additional behavioral confirmation, in macaque monkeys, of our previous human psychophysical finding that informative fragments are learned during category learning
It adapts the study of category learning and fragmentbased categorization to macaque monkeys and makes it suitable for behavioral studies, and future neurophysiological studies
Summary
Visual object perception is inextricably linked to object categorization. When we recognize an object, we classify it, implicitly, into a known category. Various object recognition tasks, including detection, identification, and discrimination, are all categorization tasks of one type or another [1,2,3,4,5]. Object categorization has been a challenging computational problem because it has not been clear how to handle the enormous range of image instances for a category (or, equivalently, class). An instance of ‘‘human face’’ can be the image of any of an indefinite number of women, men, children, etc under a variety of viewing conditions (pose, illumination, size, etc). This raises the question of how to determine critical features for reliable categorization
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