Anterior inferotemporal neurons of monkeys engaged in object recognition can be highly sensitive to object retinal position

poral neurons of monkeys engaged in object recognition can be highly sensitive to object retinal position. J Neurophysiol 89: 3264 –3278, 2003; 10.1152/jn.00358.2002. Visual object recognition is compu-tationally difficult because changes in an object’s position, distance, pose, or setting may cause it to produce a different retinal image on each encounter. To robustly recognize objects, the primate brain must have mechanisms to compensate for these variations. Although these mechanisms are poorly understood, it is thought that they elaborate neuronal representations in the inferotemporal cortex that are sensitive to object form but substantially invariant to other image variations. This study examines this hypothesis for image variation resulting from changes in object position. We studied the effect of small differences (1.5°) in the retinal position of small (0.6 ° wide) visual forms on both the behavior of monkeys trained to identify those forms and the responses of 146 anterior IT (AIT) neurons collected durin