Hierarchical representations along the ventral visual pathway.

(A), Information flow along the components of the ventral visual pathway of the macaque brain, including V1, V2, dorsal portion of V4 (V4d), ventral portion of V4 (V4v), the occipitotemporal cortex (TEO), and anterior part of the inferior temporal (IT) cortex (TE). The information along the ventral pathway is finally projected to the ventroloateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) for tasks such as detection, recognition, and classification. (B), Receptive field (RF) sizes of the components along the ventral pathway for parafoveal vision. (C), Illustration of the representations along the ventral pathway. From V1 to TE, the encoded patterns become more and more complex. Based on the information encoded in a population of TE neurons, tasks (such as detection, recognition, and classification) are performed in the VLPFC and the OFC area. Adapted from [25]. Note that the basic oriented features are ICs of natural scenes. See descriptions in text.