In natural vision, primates actively move their eyes several times per second via saccades. It remains unclear whether, during this active looking, visual neurons exhibit classical retinotopic properties, anticipate gaze shifts or mirror the stable quality of perception, especially in complex natural scenes. Here, we let 13 monkeys freely view thousands of natural images across 4.6 million fixations, recorded 883 h of neuronal responses in six areas spanning primary visual to anterior inferior temporal cortex and analyzed spatial, temporal and featural selectivity in these responses. Face neurons tracked their receptive field contents, indicated by category-selective responses. Self-consistency analysis showed that general feature-selective responses also followed eye movements and remained gaze-dependent over seconds of viewing the same image. Computational models of feature-selective responses located retinotopic receptive fields during free viewing. We found limited evidence for feature-selective predictive remapping and no viewing-history integration. Thus, ventral visual neurons represent the world in a predominantly eye-centered reference frame during natural vision.

在自然视觉中，灵长类动物通过眼跳每秒主动移动眼睛几次。目前尚不清楚，在这种主动观看过程中，视觉神经元是否表现出经典的视网膜专题特性，预测凝视转移或反映稳定的感知质量，尤其是在复杂的自然场景中。在这里，我们让 13 只猴子自由地观看 460 万次注视中的数千张自然图像，记录了从初级视觉到前下颞皮层的六个区域的 883 小时的神经元反应，并分析了这些反应的空间、时间和特征选择性。面部神经元跟踪其感受野内容，由类别选择反应指示。自我一致性分析表明，一般特征选择反应也遵循眼球运动，并且在观看同一图像的几秒钟内仍然依赖于凝视。特征选择性反应的计算模型在自由观看期间定位视网膜专题感受野。我们发现功能选择性预测重新映射的证据有限，并且没有观看历史记录集成。因此，在自然视觉期间，腹侧视觉神经元在主要以眼睛为中心的参考系中代表世界。