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A new study has shown how neurons in the part of the brain responsible for recognizing objects respond to being shown a barrage of images. 

Researchers showed animal subjects a rapid succession of images. Some of the images were new and some were seen by subjects more than 100 times. Researchers then measured the electrical response of individual neurons in the inferotemporal cortex, which is an essential part of the visual system. It is also the part of the brain that is responsible for object recognition.

Researchers found that when subjects were exposed to familiar and unfamiliar images in a rapid succession, their neurons - especially the inhibitory neurons - fired much more strongly and selectively to images the subject had seen several times before. 

"It was such a dramatic effect, it leapt out at us," Carl Olson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, said in the press release. "You wouldn't expect there to be such deep changes in the brain from simply making things familiar. We think this may be a mechanism the brain uses to track a rapidly changing visual environment."

Eventually, they ran a similar experiment and kept themselves as subjects. They recorded their brain activity using EEG. They found that human's brains responded similarly to the animal subjects' brains when presented with familiar or previously unseen images in rapid succession. 

The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.