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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mark EldridgeORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply 2025.Primates can rapidly categorize images by visual feature similarity. We previously showed that inferior temporal cortex (IT) subregions TEO and TE contribute to visual categorization to differing extents. To investigate the neural plasticity underlying visual categorization, we recorded simultaneously from both areas while two male monkeys learned a visual categorization task. Category specificity and generalization are initially stronger in TEO than in TE but increase with learning only in the TE neuronal population, whose neural representations correlate with behavioral performance. TE and TEO can contribute complementary, partially independent category information. However, TEO does not add learning-relevant variance across days. TE exhibits greater categorical enhancement for correct than error trials compared with TEO. Single-neuron analyses revealed that TE category selectivity strengthens with learning, primarily through enhanced encoding of one category. Combined with lesion evidence, our results suggest that TE plasticity likely plays a more fundamental role in supporting visual category learning.
Author(s): Wang W, Li B, Matsumoto N, Gomez KM, Hayashi K, Sugase-Miyamoto Y, Saunders RC, Richmond BJ, Eldridge MAG
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature Communications
Year: 2025
Volume: 16
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 10/12/2025
Acceptance date: 06/11/2025
Date deposited: 05/01/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2041-1723
Publisher: Nature Research
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66387-3
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-66387-3
Data Access Statement: The source data are provided in the Source Data file available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29896067. Source data are provided with this paper. The core analysis code is available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9. figshare.29896067.
PubMed id: 41372158
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