Monkeys Quickly Learn and Generalize Visual Categories without Lateral Prefrontal Cortex

摘要: Categorization is a basic mental process that helps individuals distinguish among groups of negative and positive objects, e.g., poisons nutrients, or predators prey. Monkey experiments have suggested lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) participates in learning processing visual categories. However, humans category specific agnosia follows inferior temporal but not LPFC damage. Here, we use new behavioral approach to show both normal monkeys those with bilateral removal learn generalize perceptual categories related stimuli rapidly without explicit instruction. These results strongly indicate categorization occurs at some earlier stage feed-forward processing, presumably cortex, top-down information from LPFC.