TY - JOUR TI - Emergence of transformation-tolerant representations of visual objects in rat lateral extrastriate cortex AU - Tafazoli, Sina AU - Safaai, Houman AU - De Franceschi, Gioia AU - Rosselli, Federica Bianca AU - Vanzella, Walter AU - Riggi, Margherita AU - Buffolo, Federica AU - Panzeri, Stefano AU - Zoccolan, Davide A2 - Tsao, Doris Y VL - 6 PY - 2017 DA - 2017/04/11 SP - e22794 C1 - eLife 2017;6:e22794 DO - 10.7554/eLife.22794 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22794 AB - Rodents are emerging as increasingly popular models of visual functions. Yet, evidence that rodent visual cortex is capable of advanced visual processing, such as object recognition, is limited. Here we investigate how neurons located along the progression of extrastriate areas that, in the rat brain, run laterally to primary visual cortex, encode object information. We found a progressive functional specialization of neural responses along these areas, with: (1) a sharp reduction of the amount of low-level, energy-related visual information encoded by neuronal firing; and (2) a substantial increase in the ability of both single neurons and neuronal populations to support discrimination of visual objects under identity-preserving transformations (e.g., position and size changes). These findings strongly argue for the existence of a rat object-processing pathway, and point to the rodents as promising models to dissect the neuronal circuitry underlying transformation-tolerant recognition of visual objects. KW - object recognition KW - visual cortex KW - invariance KW - transformation tolerance KW - neuronal coding KW - information theory JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -