Exploring the roles of the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes in visual learning, memory and recognition

David J. Freedman

Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA and

Department of Neurobiology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Our ability to form long-term associations between behaviorally related items is a cornerstone of higher-level cognition, and allows us to respond appropriately to sensory stimuli. While much is known about the processing of basic visual features (e.g. contrast, orientation, and motion direction) in early stages of the visual system, less is known about how the brain learns and encodes more abstract and meaningful information about visual stimuli.

 This talk will review a series of experiments aimed at understanding the respective roles of several interconnected brain in associating, or linking together, behaviorally-related visual stimuli. By recording the activity of individual neurons in monkeys trained to group visual stimuli into categories, we found that activity in two brain areas, the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and lateral intraparietal area (LIP), robustly encoded the behavioral relevance, or category membership, of visual stimuli. This suggests that both the PFC and LIP may be important stages for the transformation of visual information to more abstract representations that reflect the behavioral relevance of visual stimuli.