Functional connections between visual areas in extracting object features critical for a visual categorization task

The ability to group visual stimuli into meaningful categories is a fundamental cognitive process. Several experiments have been made to investigate the neural mechanism of visual categorization task. Although experimental evidence is known that prefrontal cortex (PFC) and inferior temporal cortex (ITC) sensitively respond in categorization task, little is known about the functional role of interaction between PFC and ITC in categorization task. To address this issue, we present a model, which performs categorization via an interaction between ITC, PFC, and posterior parietal (PP). Using the model, we show here that the functional connections of synapses between neurons in these areas are organized by the learning depending on a reward that is given only by correct behaviors for the task. We also show that the feedback from PFC to ITC allows the sensitivity enhancement of the ITC neurons encoding the object features critical for the task, and the feedback from PFC to PP works as a spatial attention required for finding object feature critical for the task. The model seems to be comparable with experimental data about categorization.