Effect of image scrambling on inferior temporal cortical responses

Imaging studies compared activations elicited by images of objects and scrambled versions of these same images in order to localize human brain regions involved in object recognition. Given these studies and the known role of macaque temporal cortex in object recognition, I determined the effect of image scrambling on the responses of macaque inferior temporal neurons. Images of natural objects were scrambled to different degrees. The response of most neurons decreased with increasing degrees of scrambling. In 26% of the neurons, response was reduced by 50% when the image was scrambled using only four parts, but most neurons tolerated higher degrees of scrambling, suggesting that these neurons code object parts instead of entire objects. These results are related to human functional imaging studies.