%V 12
%P 207-214
%L publicatio32495
%T How task-related are the responses of inferior temporal neurons?
%A  Vogels Rufin
%A  SĂĄry Gyula
%A  Orban Guy A.
%R MTMT:1137593 10.1017/S0952523800007884
%I mi
%X The responses of inferior temporal (IT) neurons may depend on the behavioral
context of the stimuli; e.g. in Konorski tasks responses to two successively
presented physically identical stimuli can be markedly different. This effect has
been interpreted as being linked to the behavioral task, and to be involved in
short-term memory and/or the temporal comparison of successively presented
stimuli. We tested whether this behavioral context effect also occurs when the
monkey is not executing a Konorski task, i.e. no temporal comparison of stimuli
is being performed. Responses of the same IT neurons under two behavioral
conditions were compared using the same temporal stimulus sequence (but different
stimuli): a Konorski task and a Fixation task. We found that the occurrence of
the behavioral context effect did not depend on the execution of the short-term
memory task. The observed decline in the level of responses to repeated
presentation of similar stimuli is interpreted as being a passive mechanism
involved in recency detection, which occurs even if the recency information is
not useful for the task. The importance of these results in the interpretation of
"task-related" neuronal responses is discussed.
%N 2
%D 1995
%J VISUAL NEUROSCIENCE