Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex.

Overview

1. Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, Caltech, Pasadena, CA USA
2. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA USA
3. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA USA

Abstract

A fundamental paradigm in neuroscience is that neurons represent the world through fixed tuning functions, with stable mappings from stimulus features to firing rates1. Here, we report that tuning can instead shift rapidly and coherently across a neural population, enabling a dynamic transition from detecting a broad category to discriminating individual exemplars. We set out to address a longstanding debate in visual neuroscience about whether the inferotemporal cortex uses a specialized code for specific object categories or a general-purpose code that applies to all objects. We found that face-selective cells in macaque inferotemporal cortex initially adopted a general code optimized for face detection. However, after a rapid concerted population event lasting less than 20 ms, the neural code transformed into a face-specific one, with two striking features: response gradients to principal detection-related dimensions reversed direction, and new tuning emerged for multiple higher-dimensional features that support fine face discrimination. These dynamics in face patches were specific to face stimuli and did not occur in response to non-face objects. Thus, for faces, face cells transition from detection to discrimination by switching from an object-general code to a face-specific one. More broadly, our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation: concerted stimulus-dependent switching of the neural code used by a cortical area.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper says that its authors' code is available on request: it was not published with the paper, so there is nothing to verify.

Code availability

All the code is available from the corresponding authors (Y.S. and D.Y.T.) upon reasonable request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• huggingface.co/datasets/retowyss/syn-vis-v0, at Hugging Face; found in the references
• kaggle.com/datasets/andrewmvd, at Kaggle; found in the text, “Non-human and ambiguous face-like stimuli”

Data availability

The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors (Y.S. and D.Y.T.) upon reasonable request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

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Version 1, 30 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 6 authors, 2 keywords, 12 MeSH terms, 52 references.

Cite

This paper

Shi, Y., Bi, D., Hesse, J. K., Lanfranchi, F. F., Chen, S., & Tsao, D. Y. (2026). Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex. Nature, 653(8113), 146-155. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10267-3

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