Tang Shiming’s research group from the School of Life Sciences discovered the functional areas in the visual cortex V4 of macaques that represent medium-complexity shape features

Visual shape information is mainly processed by the ventral pathway (V1-V2-V4-IT) of the visual cortex of the brain.

Peking University School of Life Sciences, Peking University-Tsinghua Life Sciences Joint Center, Peking University IDG McGovern Institute of Brain Science Researcher Tang Shiming's research group published a paper entitled " Clustered functional domains for curves and corners in cortical area V4 " in Elife .

(A) Ventral visual pathway; (B) "Circular area" and "corner area" on the cortex; (C) Neuron distribution and example neurons

The research team measured the response of V4 neurons to a large number of random natural pictures in the previous work.

All in all, the research team discovered functional areas that encode arcs and angles in the middle visual cortex V4 of rhesus monkeys, which supplemented the process of visual shape feature processing with a piece of the remaining puzzle, that is, the representation of intermediate complexity shape features

Tang Shiming is the corresponding author of the paper