ArticleJournal of neurophysiology2022
A separable neural code in monkey IT enables perfect CAPTCHA decoding.
Article in Journal of neurophysiology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Shape and word parts combine linearly in the Bouba-Kiki effect.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Article
- Visual homogeneity computations in the brain enable solving property-based visual tasks.eLife · 2025Article
- Using compositionality to understand parts in whole objects.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Reading distorted letters is easy for us but so challenging for the machine vision that it is used on websites as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). How does our brain solve this problem? One solution is to have neurons selective for letter combinations but invariant to distortions. Another is for neurons to encode letter distortions and longer strings to enable separable decoding. Here, we provide evidence for the latter possibility using neural recordings in the monkey inferior temporal (IT) cortex. Neural responses to distorted strings were explained better as a product (but not sum) of shape and distortion tuning, whereas by contrast, responses to letter combinations were explained better as a sum (but not product) of letters. These two rules were sufficient for perfect CAPTCHA decoding and were also emergent in neural networks trained for word recognition. Thus, a separable neural code enables efficient letter recognition.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.