The
sketch of the idea of the grandmother cell: a neuron that reacts
selectively on a pattern: Jennifer Aniston cell, Dodecahedron cell, and
'Grandmother cell' cell, which reacts on the copy of this cartoon.
The grandmother cell, sometimes called the "Jennifer Aniston neuron", is a hypothetical neuron that represents a complex but specific concept or object. It activates when a person "sees, hears, or otherwise sensibly discriminates"
a specific entity, such as his or her grandmother. The term was in use
at least as early as 1966 amongst staff and students in the Department
of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, England. A similar
concept, that of the gnostic neuron, was proposed two years later by Jerzy Konorski.
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Face selective cells
Visual neurons in the inferior temporal cortex of the monkey fire selectively to hands and faces.
These cells are selective in that they do not fire for other visual
objects important for monkeys such as fruit and genitalia. Research
finds that some of these cells can be trained to show high specificity
for arbitrary visual objects, and these would seem to fit the
requirements of gnostic/grandmother cells. In addition, evidence exists for cells in the human hippocampus that have highly selective responses to gnostic categories including highly selective responses to individual human faces.
However most of the reported face-selective cells are not
grandmother/gnostic cells since they do not represent a specific
percept, that is, they are not cells narrowly selective in their
activations for one face and only one face irrespective of
transformations of size, orientation, and color. Even the most selective
face cells usually also discharge, if more weakly, to a variety of
individual faces. Furthermore, face-selective cells often vary in their
responsiveness to different aspects of faces. This suggests that cell
responsiveness arises from the need of a monkey to differentiate among
different individual faces rather than among other categories of stimuli
such as bananas with their discrimination properties linked to the fact
that different individual faces are much more similar to each other in
their overall organization and fine detail than other kinds of stimuli.
Moreover, it has been suggested that these cells might in fact be
responding as specialized feature detector neurons that only function in
the holistic context of a face construct.
One idea has been that such cells form ensembles for the coarse
or distributed coding of faces rather than detectors for specific faces.
Thus, a specific grandmother may be represented by a specialized
ensemble of grandmother or near grandmother cells.
Individual specific recognition cells
In 2005, a UCLA and Caltech study found evidence of different cells that fire in response to particular people, such as Bill Clinton or Jennifer Aniston. A neuron for Halle Berry, for example, might respond "to the concept, the abstract entity, of Halle Berry", and would fire not only for images of Halle Berry, but also to the actual name "Halle Berry".
However, there is no suggestion in that study that only the cell being
monitored responded to that concept, nor was it suggested that no other
actress would cause that cell to respond (although several other
presented images of actresses did not cause it to respond). The researchers believe that they have found evidence for sparseness, rather than for grandmother cells.
Further evidence for the theory that a small neural network
provides facial recognition was found from analysis of cell recording
studies of macaque monkeys. By formatting faces as points in a
high-dimensional linear space, the scientists discovered that each face
cell’s firing rate is proportional to the projection of an incoming face
stimulus onto a single axis in this space, allowing a face cell
ensemble of about 200 cells to encode the location of any face in the
space.
Sparseness vs distributed representations
The grandmother cell hypothesis, is an extreme version of the idea of sparseness,
and is not without critics. The opposite of the grandmother cell theory
is the distributed representation theory, that states that a specific
stimulus is coded by its unique pattern of activity over a large group
of neurons widely distributed in the brain.
The arguments against the sparseness include:
- According to some theories, one would need thousands of cells for each face, as any given face must be recognised from many different angles – profile, 3/4 view, full frontal, from above, etc.
- Rather than becoming more and more specific as visual processing proceeds from retina through the different visual centres of the brain, the image is partially dissected into basic features such as vertical lines, colour, speed, etc., distributed in various modules separated by relatively large distances. How all these disparate features are re-integrated to form a seamless whole is known as the binding problem.
Pontifical cells
William James in 1890 proposed a related idea of a pontifical cell.
The pontifical cell is defined as a putative, and implausible cell
which had all our experiences. It is in this different from a concept
specific cell in that it is the site of experience of sense data.
James's 1890 pontifical cell was instead a cell "to which the rest of
the brain provided a representation" of a grandmother. The experience of
grandmother occurred in this cell.
