Learning and disrupting invariance in visual recognition

Learning by temporal association rules such as Foldiak’s trace rule [1] is an attractive hypothesis that explains the development of invariance in visual recognition. Consistent with these rules, several recent experiments have shown that invariance can be broken by appropriately altering the visual environment but found puzzling differences in the effects at the psychophysical [2, 3] versus single cell [4, 5] level. We show a) that associative learning provides appropriate invariance in models of object recognition inspired by Hubel and Wiesel [6], b) that we can replicate the ”invariance disruption” experiments using these models with a temporal association learning rule to develop and maintain invariance, and c) that we can thereby explain the apparent discrepancies between psychophysics and singe cells effects. We argue that these models account for the stability of perceptual invariance despite the underlying plasticity of the system, the variability of the visual world and expected noise in the biological mechanisms.