Faulty remembrance of objects past
The primate brain analyzes visual input along the ventral processing stream to extract the identity of an object. The final stage of this stream, the perirhinal cortex, plays a crucial role in object recognition. Tamura et al. systematically biased the judgments of monkeys in an old-new object recognition task by using either optogenetic or electrical stimulation. The monkeys judged an encountered object as familiar when the stimulation site was in a hotspot where memory neurons were clustered. However, at the hotspot's fringe region, where neurons lost selective responses to the learned objects, electrical microstimulation led the monkeys to mistakenly judge an object as never seen before.
Science, this issue p. 687
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
