Prefrontal Cortex and Recognition

Professor Earl Miller describes research that shows objects are recognized using higher brain regions, specifically the prefrontal cortex.

Visual categories were thought to be largely represented in the visual cortex and the more posterior parts of the brain. What we found is that these visual categories, at least learned visual categories, categories the monkeys had to be trained to use, are explicitly represented in the prefrontal cortex and not in visual cortex. That was a surprise to me and a surprise to a number of people in the field because we thought it would be happening at a lower level than what we actually discovered. It's happening at the highest reaches of the brain, at least for categories that are brand new learned categories.