Further evidence on elevated discrimination limens for reduced patterns in monkeys with inferotemporal lesions

An attempt was made to elucidate the nature and neural basis of the elevated discrimination limen for visual stimuli of reduced sizes that had been discovered earlier in monkeys with inferotemporal lesions. Although anterior inferotemporal damage was found to have only negligible effect, both total inferotemporal and posterior inferotemporal lesions yielded markedly elevated limens for reduced pattern stimuli but not for reduced colour stimuli. The impaired animals could be trained to discriminate reduced patterns that were below their original discrimination limen, but this required many more trials than were needed for postoperative relearning of the initial pair; normal animals, by contrast, showed perfect transfer from the standard to the smallest pair. The findings suggest that the increased threshold for reduced patterns in monkeys with inferotemporal lesion is attributable not to a visual acuity disorder but to an impairment of pattern perception resulting mainly from damage to posterior inferotemporal cortex.