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1
HUGUES, ETIENNE, and JORGE V. JOSÉ. "STIMULUS COMPETITION IN ATTENTION: A NEURAL MODEL OF VISUAL CORTEX AREA V4." International Journal of Modern Physics E 17, no. 05 (May 2008): 915–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/s0218301308010258.
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When a monkey is presented simultaneously two stimuli in the receptive field of a neuron in the visual cortex area V4, the neuron firing rate response is intermediate between the neuron response when both stimuli are presented alone. This phenomenon is called stimulus competition. To study its basic underlying neural mechanisms, we calculate the neuron firing rate response to different stimulus configurations. We find that stimulus competition can arise from the neuron's response properties alone, but only for a limited set of stimulus pair parameters. Furthermore, network properties may be important in modifying the inputs so that competition may occur for much wider sets of stimulus pairs.
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Richmond, B. J., and L. M. Optican. "Temporal encoding of two-dimensional patterns by single units in primate primary visual cortex. II. Information transmission." Journal of Neurophysiology 64, no. 2 (August 1, 1990): 370–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1990.64.2.370.
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1. Previously, we studied how picture information was processed by neurons in inferior temporal cortex. We found that responses varying in both response strength and temporal waveform carried information about briefly flashed stationary black-and-white patterns. Now, we have applied that same paradigm to the study of striate cortical neurons. 2. In this approach the responses to a set of basic black and white pictures were quantified through use of a set of basic waveforms, the principal components (extracted from all the responses of each neuron). We found that the first principal component, which corresponds to the response strength, and others, which correspond to different basic temporal activity patterns, were significantly related to the stimuli, i.e., the stimulus drove both the response strength and its temporal pattern. 3. Our previous study had shown that, when information theory was used to quantify the stimulus-response relation, inferior temporal neurons convey over twice as much information in a response code that includes temporal modulation as in a response code that includes only the response strength. This study shows that striate cortical neurons also carry twice as much information in a temporal code as in a response strength code. Thus single visual neurons at both ends of a cortical processing chain for visual pattern use a multidimensional temporal code to carry stimulus-related information. 4. These results support our multiplex-filter hypothesis, which states that single visual system neurons can be regarded as several simultaneously active parallel channels, each of which conveys independent information about the stimulus.
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Allman, Brian L., and M. Alex Meredith. "Multisensory Processing in “Unimodal” Neurons: Cross-Modal Subthreshold Auditory Effects in Cat Extrastriate Visual Cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 98, no. 1 (July 2007): 545–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00173.2007.
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Historically, the study of multisensory processing has examined the function of the definitive neuron type, the bimodal neuron. These neurons are excited by inputs from more than one sensory modality, and when multisensory stimuli are present, they can integrate their responses in a predictable manner. However, recent studies have revealed that multisensory processing in the cortex is not restricted to bimodal neurons. The present investigation sought to examine the potential for multisensory processing in nonbimodal (unimodal) neurons in the retinotopically organized posterolateral lateral suprasylvian (PLLS) area of the cat. Standard extracellular recordings were used to measure responses of all neurons encountered to both separate- and combined-modality stimulation. Whereas bimodal neurons behaved as predicted, the surprising result was that 16% of unimodal visual neurons encountered were significantly facilitated by auditory stimuli. Because these unimodal visual neurons did not respond to an auditory stimulus presented alone but had their visual responses modulated by concurrent auditory stimulation, they represent a new form of multisensory neuron: the subthreshold multisensory neuron. These data also demonstrate that bimodal neurons can no longer be regarded as the exclusive basis for multisensory processing.
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Gharat, Amol, and Curtis L. Baker. "Motion-defined contour processing in the early visual cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 108, no. 5 (September 1, 2012): 1228–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00840.2011.
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From our daily experience, it is very clear that relative motion cues can contribute to correctly identifying object boundaries and perceiving depth. Motion-defined contours are not only generated by the motion of objects in a scene but also by the movement of an observer's head and body (motion parallax). However, the neural mechanism involved in detecting these contours is still unknown. To explore this mechanism, we extracellularly recorded visual responses of area 18 neurons in anesthetized and paralyzed cats. The goal of this study was to determine if motion-defined contours could be detected by neurons that have been previously shown to detect luminance-, texture-, and contrast-defined contours cue invariantly. Motion-defined contour stimuli were generated by modulating the velocity of high spatial frequency sinusoidal luminance gratings (carrier gratings) by a moving squarewave envelope. The carrier gratings were outside the luminance passband of a neuron, such that presence of the carrier alone within the receptive field did not elicit a response. Most neurons that responded to contrast-defined contours also responded to motion-defined contours. The orientation and direction selectivity of these neurons for motion-defined contours was similar to that of luminance gratings. A given neuron also exhibited similar selectivity for the spatial frequency of the carrier gratings of contrast- and motion-defined contours. These results suggest that different second-order contours are detected in a form-cue invariant manner, through a common neural mechanism in area 18.
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Wang, Xiao-Jing, Yinghui Liu, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and David A. McCormick. "Adaptation and Temporal Decorrelation by Single Neurons in the Primary Visual Cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 89, no. 6 (June 2003): 3279–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00242.2003.
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Limiting redundancy in the real-world sensory inputs is of obvious benefit for efficient neural coding, but little is known about how this may be accomplished by biophysical neural mechanisms. One possible cellular mechanism is through adaptation to relatively constant inputs. Recent investigations in primary visual (V1) cortical neurons have demonstrated that adaptation to prolonged changes in stimulus contrast is mediated in part through intrinsic ionic currents, a Ca2+-activated K+ current ( IKCa) and especially a Na+-activated K+ current ( IKNa). The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that the activation of adaptation ionic currents may provide a cellular mechanism for temporal decorrelation in V1. A conductance-based neuron model was simulated, which included an IKCa and an IKNa. We show that the model neuron reproduces the adaptive behavior of V1 neurons in response to high contrast inputs. When the stimulus is stochastic with 1/ f 2 or 1/ f-type temporal correlations, these autocorrelations are greatly reduced in the output spike train of the model neuron. The IKCa is effective at reducing positive temporal correlations at approximately 100-ms time scale, while a slower adaptation mediated by IKNa is effective in reducing temporal correlations over the range of 1–20 s. Intracellular injection of stochastic currents into layer 2/3 and 4 (pyramidal and stellate) neurons in ferret primary visual cortical slices revealed neuronal responses that exhibited temporal decorrelation in similarity with the model. Enhancing the slow afterhyperpolarization resulted in a strengthening of the decorrelation effect. These results demonstrate the intrinsic membrane properties of neocortical neurons provide a mechanism for decorrelation of sensory inputs.
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Carandini, Matteo, Horace B. Barlow, Lawrence P. O'keefe, Allen B. Poirson, and J. Anthony Movshon. "Adaptation to contingencies in macaque primary visual cortex." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 352, no. 1358 (August 29, 1997): 1149–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1997.0098.
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We tested the hypothesis that neurons in the primary visual cortex adapt selectively to contingencies in the attributes of visual stimuli. We recorded from single neurons in macaque V1 and measured the effects of adaptation either to the sum of two gratings (compound stimulus) or to the individual gratings. According to our hypothesis, there would be a component of adaptation that is specific to the compound stimulus. In a first series of experiments, the two gratings differed in orientation. One grating had optimal orientation and the other was orthogonal to it, and therefore did not activate the neuron under study. These experiments provided evidence in favour of our hypothesis. In most cells adaptation to the compound stimulus reduced responses to the compound stimulus more than it reduced responses to the optimal grating, and adaptation to the optimal grating reduced responses to the optimal grating more than it reduced responses to the compound stimulus. This suggests that a component of adaptation was specific to (and caused by) the simultaneous presence of the two orientations in the compound stimulus. To test whether V1 neurons could adapt to other contingencies in the stimulus attributes, we performed a second series of experiments, in which the component gratings were parallel but differed in spatial frequency, and were both effective in activating the neuron under study. These experiments failed to reveal convincing contingent effects of adaptation, suggesting that neurons cannot adapt equally well to all types of contingency.
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Carlson, Synnöve, Pia Rämä, Heikki Tanila, Ilkka Linnankoski, and Heikki Mansikka. "Dissociation of Mnemonic Coding and Other Functional Neuronal Processing in the Monkey Prefrontal Cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 77, no. 2 (February 1, 1997): 761–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1997.77.2.761.
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Carlson, Synnöve, Pia Rämä, Heikki Tanila, Ilkka Linnankoski, and Heikki Mansikka. Dissociation of mnemonic coding and other functional neuronal processing in the monkey prefrontal cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 77: 761–774, 1997. Single-neuron activity was recorded in the prefrontal cortex of three monkeys during the performance of a spatial delayed alternation (DA) task and during the presentation of a variety of visual, auditory, and somatosensory stimuli. The aim was to study the relationship between mnemonic neuronal processing and other functional neuronal responsiveness at the single-neuron level in the prefrontal cortex. Recordings were performed in both experimental situations from 152 neurons. The majority of the neurons (92%) was recorded in the prefrontal cortex. Nine of the neurons were recorded in the dorsal bank of the anterior cingulate sulcus and two in the premotor cortex. Of the total number of neurons recorded in the prefrontal area, 32% fired in relation to the DA task performance and 39% were responsive to sensory stimulation or to the movements of the monkey outside of the memory task context. Altogether 42% of the recorded neurons were neither activated by the various stimuli nor by the DA task performance. Three types of task-related neuronal activity were recorded: delay related, delay and movement related, and movement related. The majority of the task-related neurons ( n = 33, 73%) fired in relation to the delay period. Of the delay-related neurons, 26 (79%) were spatially selective. The number of spatially selective delay-related neurons of the whole population of recorded neurons was 18%. Twelve task-related neurons (27%) fired in relation to the response period of the DA task. Five of these neurons changed their firing rate during the delay period and were classified as delay/movement-related neurons. Contrary to the delay-related neurons, less than half (42%) of the response-related neurons were spatially selective. The majority (70%) of the delay-related neurons could not be activated by any of the sensory stimuli used and did not fire in relation to the movements of the monkey. The remaining portion of the delay-related neurons was activated by stationary and moving visual stimuli or by visual fixation of an object. In contrast to the delay-related neurons, the majority (66%) of the task-related neurons firing in relation to the movement period were also responsive to sensory stimulation outside of the task context. The majority of these neurons responded to visual stimulation, visual fixation of an object, or tracking eye movements. One neuron gave a somatomotor and another a polysensory response. The majority ( n = 37, 67%) of all neurons responding to stimulation outside of the task context did not fire in relation to the DA task performance. The majority of their responses was elicited by visual stimuli or was related to visual fixation of an object or to eye movements. Only six neurons fired in relation to auditory, somatosensory, or somatomotor stimulation. This study provides further evidence about the significance of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in spatial working memory processing. Although a considerable number of all DA task-related neurons responded to visual, somatosensory, and auditory stimulation or to the movements of the monkey, most delay-related neurons engaged in the spatial DA task did not respond to extrinsic sensory stimulation. These results indicate that most prefrontal neurons firing selectively during the delay phase of the DA task are highly specialized and process only task-related information.
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Yang, Jin, and Stephen G. Lisberger. "Relationship Between Adapted Neural Population Responses in MT and Motion Adaptation in Speed and Direction of Smooth-Pursuit Eye Movements." Journal of Neurophysiology 101, no. 5 (May 2009): 2693–707. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00061.2009.
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We have asked how sensory adaptation is represented in the response of a population of visual motion neurons and whether the neural adaptation could drive behavioral adaptation. Our approach was to evaluate the effects of about 10 s of motion adaptation on both smooth-pursuit eye movements and the responses of neuron populations in extrastriate middle temporal visual area (MT) in awake monkeys. Stimuli for neural recordings consisted of patches of 100% correlated dot textures. There was a wide range of effects across neurons, but on average adaptation reduced the amplitude and width of the direction tuning curves of MT neurons, without large changes in the preferred direction. The effects were greatest when the direction of the adapting stimulus corresponded to the preferred direction of the MT neuron under study. Adaptation also reduced the amplitude of speed-tuning curves, again with the greatest effect when the adapting speed was equal to the preferred speed. The adapted tuning curves were shifted toward lower preferred speeds as the adapting speed increased. We constructed populations of model MT neurons based on our experimental sample and showed that the effects of adaptation on the direction and speed of pursuit eye movements were predicted when a variant of vector averaging decoded the responses of a subset of the neural population. We conclude that the effects of motion adaptation on the responses of MT neurons can support behavioral adaptation in pursuit eye movements.
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GEISLER, WILSON S., DUANE G. ALBRECHT, ALISON M. CRANE, and LAWRENCE STERN. "Motion direction signals in the primary visual cortex of cat and monkey." Visual Neuroscience 18, no. 4 (July 2001): 501–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523801184014.
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When an image feature moves with sufficient speed it should become smeared across space, due to temporal integration in the visual system, effectively creating a spatial motion pattern that is oriented in the direction of the motion. Recent psychophysical evidence shows that such “motion streak signals” exist in the human visual system. In this study, we report neurophysiological evidence that these motion streak signals also exist in the primary visual cortex of cat and monkey. Single neuron responses were recorded for two kinds of moving stimuli: single spots presented at different velocities and drifting plaid patterns presented at different spatial and temporal frequencies. Measurements were made for motion perpendicular to the spatial orientation of the receptive field (“perpendicular motion”) and for motion parallel to the spatial orientation of the receptive field (“parallel motion”). For moving spot stimuli, as the speed increases, the ratio of the responses to parallel versus perpendicular motion increases, and above some critical speed, the response to parallel motion exceeds the response to perpendicular motion. For moving plaid patterns, the average temporal tuning function is approximately the same for both parallel motion and perpendicular motion; in contrast, the spatial tuning function is quite different for parallel motion and perpendicular motion (band pass for the former and low pass for the latter). In general, the responses to spots and plaids are consistent with the conventional model of cortical neurons with one rather surprising exception: Many cortical neurons appear to be direction selective for parallel motion. We propose a simple explanation for “parallel motion direction selectivity” and discuss its implications for the motion streak hypothesis. Taken as a whole, we find that the measured response properties of cortical neurons to moving spot and plaid patterns agree with the recent psychophysics and support the hypothesis that motion streak signals are present in V1.
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Kawano, K., M. Shidara, and S. Yamane. "Neural activity in dorsolateral pontine nucleus of alert monkey during ocular following responses." Journal of Neurophysiology 67, no. 3 (March 1, 1992): 680–703. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1992.67.3.680.
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1. Movements of the visual scene evoke short-latency ocular following responses. To study the neural mediation of the ocular following responses, we investigated neurons in the dorsolateral pontine nucleus (DLPN) of behaving monkeys. The neurons discharged during brief, sudden movements of a large-field visual stimulus, eliciting ocular following. Most of them (100/112) responded to movements of a large-field visual stimulus with directional selectivity. 2. Response amplitude was measured in two components of the neural response: an initial transient component and a late sustained component. Most direction-selective DLPN neurons showed their strongest responses at high stimulus speeds (80-160 degrees/s), whether their response components were initial (63/87, 72%) or sustained (63/87, 72%). The average firing rates of 87 DLPN neurons increased as a linear function of the logarithm of stimulus speed up to 40 degrees/s for both initial and sustained responses. 3. Not only the magnitude but also the latency of the neural and ocular responses were dependent on stimulus speed. The latencies of both neural and ocular responses were inversely related to the stimulus speed. As a result, the time difference between the response latencies for neural and ocular responses did not vary much with changes of stimulus speed. 4. Response latency was measured when a large-field random dot pattern was moved in the preferred direction and at the preferred speed of each neuron. Seventy-three percent (56/77) of the neurons were activated less than 50 ms after the onset of the stimulus motion. In most cases (67/77, 87%), their increase of firing rate started before the eye movements, and 34% of them (26/77) started greater than 10 ms before the eye movements. 5. Blurring of the random dot pattern by interposing a sheet of ground glass increased the latency of both neural responses and eye movements. On the other hand, the blurred images did not change the timing of the effect of blanking the visual scene on the responses of the neurons or eye movements. 6. When a check pattern was used instead of random dots, both neural and ocular responses began to decrease rapidly when the temporal frequency of the visual stimulus exceeded 20 Hz. When the temporal frequency of the visual stimulus approached 40 Hz, the neurons showed a distinctive burst-and-pause firing pattern. The eye movements recorded at the same time showed signs of oscillation, and their temporal patterns were closely correlated to those of the firing rate.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Tamura, Hiroshi, Hidekazu Kaneko, Keisuke Kawasaki, and Ichiro Fujita. "Presumed Inhibitory Neurons in the Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex: Visual Response Properties and Functional Interactions With Adjacent Neurons." Journal of Neurophysiology 91, no. 6 (June 2004): 2782–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.01267.2003.
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Neurons in area TE of the monkey inferior temporal cortex respond selectively to images of particular objects or their characteristic visual features. The mechanism of generation of the stimulus selectivity, however, is largely unknown. This study addresses the role of inhibitory TE neurons in this process by examining their visual response properties and interactions with adjacent target neurons. We applied cross-correlation analysis to spike trains simultaneously recorded from pairs of adjacent neurons in anesthetized macaques. Neurons whose activity preceded a decrease in activity from their partner were presumed to be inhibitory neurons. Excitatory neurons were also identified as the source neuron of excitatory linkage as evidenced by a sharp peak displaced from the 0-ms bin in cross-correlograms. Most inhibitory neurons responded to a variety of visual stimuli in our stimulus set, which consisted of several dozen geometrical figures and photographs of objects, with a clear stimulus preference. On average, 10% of the stimuli increased firing rates of the inhibitory neurons. Both excitatory and inhibitory neurons exhibited a similar degree of stimulus selectivity. Although inhibitory neurons occasionally shared the most preferred stimuli with their target neurons, overall stimulus preferences were less similar between adjacent neurons with inhibitory linkages than adjacent neurons with common inputs and/or excitatory linkages. These results suggest that inhibitory neurons in area TE are activated selectively and exert stimulus-specific inhibition on adjacent neurons, contributing to shaping of stimulus selectivity of TE neurons.
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Rollenhagen, Julianne E., and Carl R. Olson. "Low-Frequency Oscillations Arising From Competitive Interactions Between Visual Stimuli in Macaque Inferotemporal Cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 94, no. 5 (November 2005): 3368–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00158.2005.
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Some neurons in the inferotemporal cortex (IT) of the macaque monkey respond to visual stimuli by firing action potentials in a series of sharply defined bursts at a frequency of about 5 Hz. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that the oscillatory responses of these neurons depend on competitive interactions with other neurons selective for different stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we monitored responses to probe images displayed in the presence of other already visible backdrop images. Two stimuli were used in testing each neuron: a foveal image that, when displayed alone, elicited an excitatory response (the “object”) and a peripheral image that, when displayed alone, elicited little or no activity (the “flanker”). We assessed the results of presenting these images separately and together in monkeys trained to maintain central fixation. Two novel phenomena emerged. First, displaying the object in the presence of the flanker enhanced the strength of the oscillatory component of the response to the object. This effect varied in strength across task contexts and may have depended on the monkey's allocating attention to the flanker. Second, displaying the flanker in the presence of the object gave rise to sometimes strong oscillations in which the initial phase was negative. This was all the more striking because the flanker by itself elicited little or no response. This effect was robust and invariant across task contexts. These results can be accounted for by competition between two neuronal populations, one selective for the object and the other for the flanker, if it is assumed that the visual responses of each population are subject to fatigue.
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Sadeh, Sadra, and Claudia Clopath. "Theory of neuronal perturbome in cortical networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 43 (October 14, 2020): 26966–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004568117.
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To unravel the functional properties of the brain, we need to untangle how neurons interact with each other and coordinate in large-scale recurrent networks. One way to address this question is to measure the functional influence of individual neurons on each other by perturbing them in vivo. Application of such single-neuron perturbations in mouse visual cortex has recently revealed feature-specific suppression between excitatory neurons, despite the presence of highly specific excitatory connectivity, which was deemed to underlie feature-specific amplification. Here, we studied which connectivity profiles are consistent with these seemingly contradictory observations, by modeling the effect of single-neuron perturbations in large-scale neuronal networks. Our numerical simulations and mathematical analysis revealed that, contrary to the prima facie assumption, neither inhibition dominance nor broad inhibition alone were sufficient to explain the experimental findings; instead, strong and functionally specific excitatory–inhibitory connectivity was necessary, consistent with recent findings in the primary visual cortex of rodents. Such networks had a higher capacity to encode and decode natural images, and this was accompanied by the emergence of response gain nonlinearities at the population level. Our study provides a general computational framework to investigate how single-neuron perturbations are linked to cortical connectivity and sensory coding and paves the road to map the perturbome of neuronal networks in future studies.
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Acar, Katerina, Lynne Kiorpes, J. Anthony Movshon, and Matthew A. Smith. "Altered functional interactions between neurons in primary visual cortex of macaque monkeys with experimental amblyopia." Journal of Neurophysiology 122, no. 6 (December 1, 2019): 2243–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00232.2019.
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Amblyopia, a disorder in which vision through one of the eyes is degraded, arises because of defective processing of information by the visual system. Amblyopia often develops in humans after early misalignment of the eyes (strabismus) and can be simulated in macaque monkeys by artificially inducing strabismus. In such amblyopic animals, single-unit responses in primary visual cortex (V1) are appreciably reduced when evoked by the amblyopic eye compared with the other (fellow) eye. However, this degradation in single V1 neuron responsivity is not commensurate with the marked losses in visual sensitivity and resolution measured behaviorally. Here we explored the idea that changes in patterns of coordinated activity across populations of V1 neurons may contribute to degraded visual representations in amblyopia, potentially making it more difficult to read out evoked activity to support perceptual decisions. We studied the visually evoked activity of V1 neuronal populations in three macaques ( Macaca nemestrina) with strabismic amblyopia and in one control animal. Activity driven through the amblyopic eye was diminished, and these responses also showed more interneuronal correlation at all stimulus contrasts than responses driven through the fellow eye or responses in the control animal. A decoding analysis showed that responses driven through the amblyopic eye carried less visual information than other responses. Our results suggest that part of the reduced visual capacity of amblyopes may be due to changes in the patterns of functional interaction among neurons in V1. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Previous work on the neurophysiological basis of amblyopia has largely focused on relating behavioral deficits to changes in visual processing by single neurons in visual cortex. In this study, we recorded simultaneously from populations of primary visual cortical (V1) neurons in macaques with amblyopia. We found changes in the strength and pattern of shared response variability between neurons. These changes in neuronal interactions could impair the visual representations of V1 populations driven by the amblyopic eye.
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Ferrari, Pier Francesco, Stefano Rozzi, and Leonardo Fogassi. "Mirror Neurons Responding to Observation of Actions Made with Tools in Monkey Ventral Premotor Cortex." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17, no. 2 (February 2005): 212–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/0898929053124910.
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In the present study, we describe a new type of visuomotor neurons, named tool-responding mirror neurons, which are found in the lateral sector of monkey ventral premotor area F5. Tool-responding mirror neurons discharge when the monkey observes actions performed by an experimenter with a tool (a stick or a pair of pliers). This response is stronger than that obtained when the monkey observes a similar action made with a biological effector (the hand or the mouth). These neurons respond also when the monkey executes actions with both the hand and the mouth. The visual and the motor responses of each neuron are congruent in that they share the same general goal, that is, taking possession of an object and modifying its state. It is hypothesized that after a relatively long visual exposure to tool actions, a visual association between the hand and the tool is created, so that the tool becomes as a kind of prolongation of the hand. We propose that tool-responding mirror neurons enable the observing monkey to extend action-understanding capacity to actions that do not strictly correspond to its motor representations. Our findings support the notion that the motor cortex plays a crucial role in understanding action goals.
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Peterson, Matthew R., Baowang Li, and Ralph D. Freeman. "Direction Selectivity of Neurons in the Striate Cortex Increases as Stimulus Contrast Is Decreased." Journal of Neurophysiology 95, no. 4 (April 2006): 2705–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00885.2005.
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Various properties of external scenes are integrated during the transmission of information along central visual pathways. One basic property concerns the sensitivity to direction of a moving stimulus. This direction selectivity (DS) is a fundamental response characteristic of neurons in the visual cortex. We have conducted a neurophysiological study of cells in the visual cortex to determine how DS is affected by changes in stimulus contrast. Previous work shows that a neuron integration time is increased at low contrasts, causing temporal changes of response properties. This leads to the prediction that DS should change with stimulus contrast. However, the change could be in a counterintuitive direction, i.e., DS could increase with reduced contrast. This possibility is of intrinsic interest but it is also of potential relevance to recent behavioral work in which human subjects exhibit increased DS as contrast is reduced. Our neurophysiological results are consistent with this finding, i.e., the degree of DS of cortical neurons is inversely related to stimulus contrast. Temporal phase differences of inputs to cortical cells may account for this result.
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Yoshioka, Takashi, Jonathan B. Levitt, and Jennifer S. Lund. "Independence and merger of thalamocortical channels within macaque monkey primary visual cortex: Anatomy of interlaminar projections." Visual Neuroscience 11, no. 3 (May 1994): 467–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523800002406.
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AbstractAn important issue in understanding the function of primary visual cortex in the macaque monkey is how the several efferent neuron groups projecting to extrastriate cortex acquire their different response properties. To assist our understanding of this issue, we have compared the anatomical distribution of VI intrinsic relays that carry information derived from magno- (M) and parvocellular (P) divisions of the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus between thalamic recipient neurons and interareal efferent neuron groups within area VI. We used small, iontophoretic injections of biocytin placed in individual cortical laminae of area VI to trace orthograde and retrograde inter- and intralaminar projections. In either the same or adjacent sections, the tissue was reacted for cytochrome oxidase (CO), which provides important landmarks for different efferent neuron populations located in CO rich blobs and CO poor interblobs in laminae ⅔, as well as defining clear boundaries for the populations of efferent neurons in laminae 4A and 4B. This study shows that the interblobs, but not the blobs, receive direct input from thalamic recipient 4C neurons; the interblobs receive relays from mid 4C neurons (believed to receive convergent M and P inputs), while blobs receive indirect inputs from either M or P (or both) pathways through layers 4B (which receives M relays from layer 4Cα) and 4A (which receives P relays directly from the thalamus as well as from layer 4Cβ). The property of orientation selectivity, most prominent in the interblob regions and in layer 4B, may have a common origin from oriented lateral projections made by mid 4C spiny stellate neurons. While layer 4B efferents may emphasize M characteristics and layer 4A efferents emphasize P characteristics, the dendrites of their constituent pyramidal neurons may provide anatomical access to the other channel since both blob and interblob regions in layers ⅔ have anatomical access to M and P driven relays, despite functional differences in the way these properties may be expressed in the two compartments.
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Kozlov, Andrei S., and Timothy Q. Gentner. "Central auditory neurons display flexible feature recombination functions." Journal of Neurophysiology 111, no. 6 (March 15, 2014): 1183–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00637.2013.
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Recognition of natural stimuli requires a combination of selectivity and invariance. Classical neurobiological models achieve selectivity and invariance, respectively, by assigning to each cortical neuron either a computation equivalent to the logical “AND” or a computation equivalent to the logical “OR.” One powerful OR-like operation is the MAX function, which computes the maximum over input activities. The MAX function is frequently employed in computer vision to achieve invariance and considered a key operation in visual cortex. Here we explore the computations for selectivity and invariance in the auditory system of a songbird, using natural stimuli. We ask two related questions: does the MAX operation exist in auditory system? Is it implemented by specialized “MAX” neurons, as assumed in vision? By analyzing responses of individual neurons to combinations of stimuli we systematically sample the space of implemented feature recombination functions. Although we frequently observe the MAX function, we show that the same neurons that implement it also readily implement other operations, including the AND-like response. We then show that sensory adaptation, a ubiquitous property of neural circuits, causes transitions between these operations in individual neurons, violating the fixed neuron-to-computation mapping posited in the state-of-the-art object-recognition models. These transitions, however, accord with predictions of neural-circuit models incorporating divisive normalization and variable polynomial nonlinearities at the spike threshold. Because these biophysical properties are not tied to a particular sensory modality but are generic, the flexible neuron-to-computation mapping demonstrated in this study in the auditory system is likely a general property.
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Lu, Shao-Ming, William Guido, and S. Murray Sherman. "The brain-stem parabrachial region controls mode of response to visual stimulation of neurons in the cat’s lateral geniculate nucleus." Visual Neuroscience 10, no. 4 (July 1993): 631–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523800005332.
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AbstractWe recorded the responses of neurons from the cat’s lateral geniculate nucleus to drifting sine-wave grating stimuli both before and during electrical stimulation of the parabrachial region of the midbrain. The parabrachial region provides a mostly cholinergic input to the lateral geniculate nucleus, and our goal was to study its effect on responses of geniculate cells to visual stimulation. Geniculate neurons respond to visual stimuli in one of two modes. At relatively hyperpolarized membrane potentials, low threshold (LT) Ca2+ spikes are activated, leading to high-frequency burst discharges (burst mode). At more depolarized levels, the low threshold Ca2+ spike is inactivated, permitting a more tonic response (relay or tonic mode). During our intracellular recordings of geniculate cells, we found that, at initially hyperpolarized membrane potentials, LT spiking in response to visual stimulation was pronounced, but that parabrachial activation abolished this LT spiking and associated burst discharges. Coupled with the elimination of LT spiking, parabrachial activation also led to a progressive increase in tonic responsiveness. Parabrachial activation thus effectively switched the responses to visual stimulation of geniculate neurons from the burst to relay mode. Accompanying this switch was a gradual depolarization of resting membrane potential by about 5–10 mV and a reduction in the hyperpolarization that normally occurs in response to the inhibitory phase of the visual stimulus. Presumably, the membrane depolarization was sufficient to inactivate the LT spikes. We were able to extend and confirm our intracellular observations on the effects of parabrachial activation to a sample of cells recorded extracellularly. This was made possible by adopting empirically determined criteria to distinguish LT bursts from tonic responses solely on the basis of the temporal pattern of action potentials. During parabrachial activation, every cell responded only in the relay mode, an effect that corresponds to our intracellular observations. We quantified the effects of parabrachial activation on various response measures. The fundamental Fourier response amplitude (Fl) was calculated separately for the total response, the tonic response component, and the LT burst component. Parabrachial activation resulted in an increased Fl amplitude for the total response. This increase was due to an increase in the tonic response component. For a subset of cells showing epochs of LT bursting, parabrachial activation concurrently reduced LT bursting and increased the amplitude of the tonic response. Parabrachial activation, by eliminating LT bursting, also caused cells to respond with more linearity. By keeping geniculate cells in the relay mode, the parabrachial region serves to maintain a more linear retinogeniculate transfer of information to cortex, and this may be important for detailed analysis of visual targets. However, when a geniculate neuron becomes hyperpolarized, as may occur during states of visual inattention, it would not respond well to visual stimuli without the sort of nonlinear amplification provided by the LT spike. Thus, the LT spike may permit hyperpolarized cells to relay to cortex the presence of a potentially salient or dangerous stimulus, but this is done at the expense of linearity. This may serve as a sort of “wake-up call” that redirects attention to a particular stimulus and eventually enhances activity of appropriate parabrachial inputs to switch the critical geniculate neurons into the relay mode.
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Sakura, Midori, Dimitrios Lambrinos, and Thomas Labhart. "Polarized Skylight Navigation in Insects: Model and Electrophysiology of e-Vector Coding by Neurons in the Central Complex." Journal of Neurophysiology 99, no. 2 (February 2008): 667–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00784.2007.
Full textAbstract:
Many insects exploit skylight polarization for visual compass orientation or course control. As found in crickets, the peripheral visual system (optic lobe) contains three types of polarization-sensitive neurons (POL neurons), which are tuned to different (∼60° diverging) e-vector orientations. Thus each e-vector orientation elicits a specific combination of activities among the POL neurons coding any e-vector orientation by just three neural signals. In this study, we hypothesize that in the presumed orientation center of the brain (central complex) e-vector orientation is population-coded by a set of “compass neurons.” Using computer modeling, we present a neural network model transforming the signal triplet provided by the POL neurons to compass neuron activities coding e-vector orientation by a population code. Using intracellular electrophysiology and cell marking, we present evidence that neurons with the response profile of the presumed compass neurons do indeed exist in the insect brain: each of these compass neuron-like (CNL) cells is activated by a specific e-vector orientation only and otherwise remains silent. Morphologically, CNL cells are tangential neurons extending from the lateral accessory lobe to the lower division of the central body. Surpassing the modeled compass neurons in performance, CNL cells are insensitive to the degree of polarization of the stimulus between 99% and at least down to 18% polarization and thus largely disregard variations of skylight polarization due to changing solar elevations or atmospheric conditions. This suggests that the polarization vision system includes a gain control circuit keeping the output activity at a constant level.
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Recanzone, G. H., R. H. Wurtz, and U. Schwarz. "Responses of MT and MST Neurons to One and Two Moving Objects in the Receptive Field." Journal of Neurophysiology 78, no. 6 (December 1, 1997): 2904–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1997.78.6.2904.
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Recanzone, G. H., R. H. Wurtz, and U. Schwarz. Responses of MT and MST neurons to one and two moving objects in the receptive field. J. Neurophysiol. 78: 2904–2915, 1997. To test the effects of complex visual motion stimuli on the responses of single neurons in the middle temporal visual area (MT) and the medial superior temporal area (MST) of the macaque monkey, we compared the response elicited by one object in motion through the receptive field with the response of two simultaneously presented objects moving in different directions through the receptive field. There was an increased response to a stimulus moving in a direction other than the best direction when it was paired with a stimulus moving in the best direction. This increase was significant for all directions of motion of the non-best stimulus and the magnitude of the difference increased as the difference in the directions of the two stimuli increased. Similarly, there was a decreased response to a stimulus moving in a non-null direction when it was paired with a stimulus moving in the null direction. This decreased response in MT did not reach significance unless the second stimulus added to the null direction moved in the best direction, whereas in MST the decrease was significant when the second stimulus direction differed from the null by 90° or more. Further analysis showed that the two-object responses were better predicted by taking the averaged response of the neuron to the two single-object stimuli than by summation, multiplication, or vector addition of the responses to each of the two single-object stimuli. Neurons in MST showed larger modulations than did neurons in MT with stimuli moving in both the best direction and in the null direction and the average better predicted the two-object response in area MST than in area MT. This indicates that areas MT and MST probably use a similar integrative mechanisms to create their responses to complex moving visual stimuli, but that this mechanism is further refined in MST. These experiments show that neurons in both MT and MST integrate the motion of all directions in their responses to complex moving stimuli. These results with the motion of objects were in sound agreement with those previously reported with the use of random dot patterns for the study of transparent motion in MT and suggest that these neurons use similar computational mechanisms in the processing of object and global motion stimuli.
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Richmond, B. J., L. M. Optican, and H. Spitzer. "Temporal encoding of two-dimensional patterns by single units in primate primary visual cortex. I. Stimulus-response relations." Journal of Neurophysiology 64, no. 2 (August 1, 1990): 351–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1990.64.2.351.
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1. Previously we developed a new approach for investigating visual system neuronal activity in which single neurons are considered to be communication channels transmitting stimulus-dependent codes in their responses. Application of this approach to the stimulus-response relations of inferior temporal (IT) neurons showed that these carry stimulus-dependent information in the temporal modulation as well as in the strength of their responses. IT cortex is a late station in the visual processing stream. Presumably the neuronal properties arise from the properties of the inputs. However, the discovery that IT neuronal spike trains transmit information in stimulus-dependent temporally modulated codes could not be assumed to be true for those earlier stations, so the techniques used in the earlier study were applied to single-striate cortical neurons in the studies reported here. 2. Single-striate cortical neurons were recorded from three awake, fixating rhesus monkeys. The neurons were stimulated by two sets of patterns. The first set was made up of 128 black-and-white patterns based on a complete, orthogonal set of two-dimensional Walsh-Hadamard functions. These stimuli appear as combinations of black-and-white rectangles and squares, and they fully span the range of all possible black-and-white pictures that can be constructed in an 8 x 8 grid. Except for the stimulus that appeared as an all-white or all-black square, each stimulus had equal areas of white and black. The second stimulus set was made up of single bars constructed in the same 8 x 8 grid as the Walsh stimuli. These were presented both as black against a gray background and white against a gray background. The stimuli were centered on the receptive field, and each member of the stimulus set was presented once before any stimulus appeared again. 3. The responses of 21 striate cortical neurons were recorded and analyzed. Two were identified as simple cells and the other 19 as complex cells according to the criteria originally used by Hubel and Wiesel. The stimulus set elicited a wide variety of response strengths and patterns from each neuron. The responses from both the bars and the Walsh set could be used to differentiate and classify simple and complex cells. 4. The responses of both simple and complex cells showed striking stimulus-related strength and temporal modulation. For all of the complex cells there were instances where the responses to a stimulus and its contrast-reversed mate were substantially different in response strength or pattern, or both.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Richmond, B. J., and L. M. Optican. "Temporal encoding of two-dimensional patterns by single units in primate inferior temporal cortex. II. Quantification of response waveform." Journal of Neurophysiology 57, no. 1 (January 1, 1987): 147–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1987.57.1.147.
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The purpose of this study was to describe how the responses of neurons in inferior temporal (IT) cortex represent visual stimuli. In the preceding paper we described the responses of IT neurons to a large set of two-dimensional black and white patterns. The responses to different stimuli showed temporal modulation of the spike trains. This paper develops a method for quantifying temporal modulation and shows that the stimulus determines the distribution over time, as well as the number, of spikes in a response. The responses were quantified using an orthogonal set of temporal waveforms called principal components. The principal components related to each neuron were extracted from all the responses of that neuron to all of the stimuli, regardless of which stimulus elicited which response. Each response was then projected onto the set of principal components to obtain a set of coefficients that quantified its temporal modulation. This decomposition produces coefficients that are uncorrelated with each other. Thus each coefficient could be tested individually, with univariate statistics, to determine whether its relation to the stimulus was nonrandom. The waveforms of the principal components are unconstrained and depend only on the responses from which they are derived; hence, they can assume any shape. Nonetheless, the 21 neurons we analyzed all had principal components that belonged to only one of two sets. The two sets could be characterized by their first principal component, which was either phasic or tonic. This suggests that these neurons may use as few as two different mechanisms in generating responses. The first principal component was highly correlated with spike count, and both were driven by the stimulus. Higher principal components were uncorrelated with spike count, yet some of them were also driven by the stimulus. Thus the principal components form a richer description of the stimulus-dependent aspects of a neuronal response than does spike count. Bootstrap tests showed that several principal components (usually 3 or 4) were determined by the stimulus. Since higher principal components were not correlated with the spike count, the stimulus must have determined the distribution of spikes in the response as well as their number. However, it is possible that the number and distribution of spikes are both determined by the same characteristics of the stimulus. In this case, the temporal modulation would be redundant, and a simple univariate measure would be sufficient to characterize the stimulus-response relationship.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Carriere, Brian N., David W. Royal, and Mark T. Wallace. "Spatial Heterogeneity of Cortical Receptive Fields and Its Impact on Multisensory Interactions." Journal of Neurophysiology 99, no. 5 (May 2008): 2357–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.01386.2007.
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Investigations of multisensory processing at the level of the single neuron have illustrated the importance of the spatial and temporal relationship of the paired stimuli and their relative effectiveness in determining the product of the resultant interaction. Although these principles provide a good first-order description of the interactive process, they were derived by treating space, time, and effectiveness as independent factors. In the anterior ectosylvian sulcus (AES) of the cat, previous work hinted that the spatial receptive field (SRF) architecture of multisensory neurons might play an important role in multisensory processing due to differences in the vigor of responses to identical stimuli placed at different locations within the SRF. In this study the impact of SRF architecture on cortical multisensory processing was investigated using semichronic single-unit electrophysiological experiments targeting a multisensory domain of the cat AES. The visual and auditory SRFs of AES multisensory neurons exhibited striking response heterogeneity, with SRF architecture appearing to play a major role in the multisensory interactions. The deterministic role of SRF architecture was tightly coupled to the manner in which stimulus location modulated the responsiveness of the neuron. Thus multisensory stimulus combinations at weakly effective locations within the SRF resulted in large (often superadditive) response enhancements, whereas combinations at more effective spatial locations resulted in smaller (additive/subadditive) interactions. These results provide important insights into the spatial organization and processing capabilities of cortical multisensory neurons, features that may provide important clues as to the functional roles played by this area in spatially directed perceptual processes.
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Lin, David J., Erin Kang, and Chinfei Chen. "Changes in input strength and number are driven by distinct mechanisms at the retinogeniculate synapse." Journal of Neurophysiology 112, no. 4 (August 15, 2014): 942–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00175.2014.
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Recent studies have demonstrated that vision influences the functional remodeling of the mouse retinogeniculate synapse, the connection between retinal ganglion cells and thalamic relay neurons in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Initially, each relay neuron receives a large number of weak retinal inputs. Over a 2- to 3-wk developmental window, the majority of these inputs are eliminated, and the remaining inputs are strengthened. This period of refinement is followed by a critical period when visual experience changes the strength and connectivity of the retinogeniculate synapse. Visual deprivation of mice by dark rearing from postnatal day (P)20 results in a dramatic weakening of synaptic strength and recruitment of additional inputs. In the present study we asked whether experience-dependent plasticity at the retinogeniculate synapse represents a homeostatic response to changing visual environment. We found that visual experience starting at P20 following visual deprivation from birth results in weakening of existing retinal inputs onto relay neurons without significant changes in input number, consistent with homeostatic synaptic scaling of retinal inputs. On the other hand, the recruitment of new inputs to the retinogeniculate synapse requires previous visual experience prior to the critical period. Taken together, these findings suggest that diverse forms of homeostatic plasticity drive experience-dependent remodeling at the retinogeniculate synapse.
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Solomon, Samuel G., Chris Tailby, Soon K. Cheong, and Aaron J. Camp. "Linear and Nonlinear Contributions to the Visual Sensitivity of Neurons in Primate Lateral Geniculate Nucleus." Journal of Neurophysiology 104, no. 4 (October 2010): 1884–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.01118.2009.
Full textAbstract:
Several parallel pathways convey retinal signals to the visual cortex of primates. The signals of the parvocellular (P) and magnocellular (M) pathways are well characterized; the properties of other rarely encountered cell types are distinctive in many ways, but it is not clear that they can provide signals with the same fidelity. Here we study this by characterizing the temporal receptive field of neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus of anesthetized marmosets. For each neuron, we measured the response to a flickering uniform field, and, from this, estimated the linear and nonlinear receptive fields using spike-triggered average (STA) and spike-triggered covariance (STC) analyses. As expected the response of most P-cells was dominated by the STA, but the response of most M-cells required additional nonlinear components, and these usually acted to suppress cell responses. The STC analysis showed stronger suppressive axes in suppressed-by-contrast cells, and both suppressive and excitatory axes in on-off cells. Together, the STA and the STC analyses form a model of the temporal response to a large uniform field: under this model, the information that was provided by suppressed-by-contrast cells or on-off cells approached that provided by the P- and M-cells. However, whereas P- and M-cells provided more information about luminance, the nonlinear cells provided more information about the contrast energy. This suggests that the nonlinear cells provide complimentary signals to those of P- and M-cells, with reasonably high fidelity, and may play an important role in normal visual processing.
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Lloyd, Donna M., Elizabeth Hall, Samantha Hall, and Francis McGlone. "Can itch-related visual stimuli provoke an itch response?" Seeing and Perceiving 25 (2012): 173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187847612x648026.
Full textAbstract:
Itching is a common subjective sensation experienced on the skin and is associated with the desire and impulse to scratch. We tested whether visual cues could generate feelings of itch and provoke a scratch response in healthy volunteers. A secondary aim was to assess whether certain pictures were more effective in evoking sensations of itch. Thirty participants viewed static images that could either be itch-related (i.e., viewing ants or skin conditions) or neutral (viewing butterflies or healthy skin). These were further separated by picture type: ‘skin contact’ (i.e., ants crawling on the skin or a butterfly sitting on the hand); ‘skin response’ (i.e., scratching an insect bite or washing the hands) or ‘no skin’ (simply viewing midges or birds flying). The results indicate that the sensation of itch was successfully generated using itch-related pictures in terms of significantly higher self-reports of itch in answer to the questions ‘how itchy do you feel?’ and ‘how itchy do you think the person in the picture feels?’ compared to viewing neutral pictures (). In addition, participants scratched themselves significantly more when viewing itch-related pictures compared to neutral (). The picture type also had an effect upon these measures with more scratching behaviour recorded when viewing pictures depicting others scratching (). This study demonstrates the impact of visual cues on the sensation of itch and the scratch response and may provide preliminary evidence linking contagious itching to the mirror neuron system and the effectiveness of itch-inducing stimuli as a way to probe social communication.
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Straub, Benjamin, and Gaby Schneider. "A Model for the Study of the Increase in Stimulus and Change Point Detection with Small and Variable Spiking Delays." Neural Computation 32, no. 7 (July 2020): 1277–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/neco_a_01285.
Full textAbstract:
Precise timing of spikes between different neurons has been found to convey reliable information beyond the spike count. In contrast, the role of small and variable spiking delays, as reported, for example, in the visual cortex, remains largely unclear. This issue becomes particularly important considering the high speed of neuronal information processing, which is assumed to be based on only a few milliseconds within each processing step. We investigate the role of small and variable spiking delays with a parsimonious stochastic spiking model that is strongly motivated by experimental observations. The model contains only two parameters for the response of a neuron to one stimulus, describing directly the rate and the delay, or phase. Within the theoretical model, we specifically investigate two quantities, the probability of correct stimulus detection and the probability of correct change point detection, as a function of these parameters and within short periods of time. Optimal combinations of the two parameters across stimuli are derived that maximize these probabilities and enable comparison of pure rate, pure phase, and combined codes. In particular, the gain in correct detection probability when adding small and variable spiking delays to pure rate coding increases with the number of stimuli. More interesting, small and variable spiking delays can considerably improve the process of detecting changes in the stimulus, while also decreasing the probability of false alarms and thus increasing robustness and speed of change point detection. The results are compared to empirical spike train recordings of neurons in the visual cortex reported earlier in response to a number of visual stimuli. The results suggest that near-optimal combinations of rate and phase parameters may be implemented in the brain and that adding phase information could particularly increase the quality of change point detection in cases of highly similar stimuli.
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Borst, A., M. Egelhaaf, and H. S. Seung. "Two-Dimensional Motion Perception in Flies." Neural Computation 5, no. 6 (November 1993): 856–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/neco.1993.5.6.856.
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We study two-dimensional motion perception in flies using a semicircular visual stimulus. Measurements of both the H1-neuron and the optomotor response are consistent with a simple model supposing spatial integration of the outputs of correlation-type motion detectors. In both experiment and model, there is substantial H1 and horizontal (yaw) optomotor response to purely vertical motion of the stimulus. We conclude that the fly's optomotor response to a two-dimensional pattern, depending on its structure, may deviate considerably from the direction of pattern motion.
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DeAngelis, G. C., R. D. Freeman, and I. Ohzawa. "Length and width tuning of neurons in the cat's primary visual cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 71, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 347–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1994.71.1.347.
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1. The classically defined receptive field of a visual neuron is the area of visual space over which the cell responds to visual stimuli. It is well established, however, that the discharge produced by an optimal stimulus can be modulated by the presence of additional stimuli that by themselves do not produce any response. This study examines inhibitory influences that originate from areas located outside of the classical (i.e., excitatory) receptive field. Previous work has shown that for some cells the response to a properly oriented bar of light becomes attenuated when the bar extends beyond the receptive field, a phenomenon known as end-inhibition (or length tuning). Analogously, it has been shown that increasing the number of cycles of a drifting grating stimulus may also inhibit the firing of some cells, an effect known as side-inhibition (or width tuning). Very little information is available, however, about the relationship between end- and side-inhibition. We have examined the spatial organization and tuning characteristics of these inhibitory effects by recording extracellularly from single neurons in the cat's striate cortex (Area 17). 2. For each cortical neuron, length and width tuning curves were obtained with the use of rectangular patches of drifting sinusoidal gratings that have variable length and width. Results from 82 cells show that the strengths of end- and side-inhibition tend to be correlated. Most cells that exhibit clear end-inhibition also show a similar degree of side-inhibition. For these cells, the excitatory receptive field is surrounded on all sides by inhibitory zones. Some cells exhibit only end- or side-inhibition, but not both. Data for 28 binocular cells show that length and width tuning curves for the dominant and nondominant eyes tend to be closely matched. 3. We also measured tuning characteristics of end- and side-inhibition. To obtain these data, the excitatory receptive field was stimulated with a grating patch having optimal orientation, spatial frequency, and size, whereas the end- or side-inhibitory regions were stimulated with patches of gratings that had a variable parameter (such as orientation). Results show that end- and side-inhibition tend to be strongest at the orientation and spatial frequency that yield maximal excitation. However, orientation and spatial frequency tuning curves for inhibition are considerably broader than those for excitation, suggesting that inhibition is mediated by a pool of neurons.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Silva, Ana C., Glyn A. McMillan, Cristina P. Santos, and John R. Gray. "Background complexity affects response of a looming-sensitive neuron to object motion." Journal of Neurophysiology 113, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 218–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00478.2014.
Full textAbstract:
An increasing number of studies show how stimulus complexity affects the responses of looming-sensitive neurons across multiple animal taxa. Locusts contain a well-described, descending motion-sensitive pathway that is preferentially looming sensitive. However, the lobula giant movement detector/descending contralateral movement detector (LGMD/DCMD) pathway responds to more than simple objects approaching at constant, predictable trajectories. In this study, we presented Locusta migratoria with a series of complex three-dimensional visual stimuli presented while simultaneously recording DCMD activity extracellularly. In addition to a frontal looming stimulus, we used a combination of compound trajectories (nonlooming transitioning to looming) presented at different velocities and onto a simple, scattered, or progressive flow field background. Regardless of stimulus background, DCMD responses to looming were characteristic and related to previously described effects of azimuthal approach angle and velocity of object expansion. However, increasing background complexity caused reduced firing rates, delayed peaks, shorter rise phases, and longer fall phases. DCMD responded to transitions to looming with a characteristic drop in a firing rate that was relatively invariant across most stimulus combinations and occurred regardless of stimulus background. Spike numbers were higher in the presence of the scattered background and reduced in the flow field background. We show that DCMD response time to a transition depends on unique expansion parameters of the moving stimulus irrespective of background complexity. Our results show how background complexity shapes DCMD responses to looming stimuli, which is explained within a behavioral context.
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Heitwerth, J., R. Kern, J. H. van Hateren, and M. Egelhaaf. "Motion Adaptation Leads to Parsimonious Encoding of Natural Optic Flow by Blowfly Motion Vision System." Journal of Neurophysiology 94, no. 3 (September 2005): 1761–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00308.2005.
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Neurons sensitive to visual motion change their response properties during prolonged motion stimulation. These changes have been interpreted as adaptive and were concluded, for instance, to adjust the sensitivity of the visual motion pathway to velocity changes or to increase the reliability of encoding of motion information. These conclusions are based on experiments with experimenter-designed motion stimuli that differ substantially with respect to their dynamical properties from the optic flow an animal experiences during normal behavior. We analyze for the first time motion adaptation under natural stimulus conditions. The experiments are done on the H1-cell, an identified neuron in the blowfly visual motion pathway that has served in many previous studies as a model system for visual motion computation. We reconstructed optic flow perceived by a blowfly in free flight and used this behaviorally generated optic flow to study motion adaptation. A variety of measures (variability in spike count, response latency, jitter of spike timing) suggests that the coding quality does not improve with prolonged stimulation. However, although the number of spikes decreases considerably during stimulation with natural optic flow, the amount of information that is conveyed stays nearly constant. Thus the information per spike increases, and motion adaptation leads to parsimonious coding without sacrificing the reliability with which behaviorally relevant information is encoded.
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FU, YU-XI, QUAN XIAO, HONG-FENG GAO, and SHU-RONG WANG. "Stimulus features eliciting visual responses from neurons in the nucleus lentiformis mesencephali in pigeons." Visual Neuroscience 15, no. 6 (November 1998): 1079–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523898156055.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of the present study was to find out what particular stimulus features, in addition to the direction and velocity of motion, specifically activate neurons in the nucleus lentiformis mesencephali (nLM) in pigeons. Visual responses of 60 nLM cells to a variety of computer-generated stimuli were extracellularly recorded and quantitatively analyzed. Ten recording sites were histologically verified to be localized within nLM with cobalt sulfide markings. It was shown that the pigeon nLM cells were specifically sensitive to the leading edge moving at the optimal velocity in the preferred direction through their excitatory receptive fields (ERFs). Generally speaking, nLM cells preferred black edges to white ones. However, this preference cannot be explained by OFF-responses to a light spot. The edge sharpness was also an essential factor influencing the responsive strength, with blurred edges producing little or no visual responses at all. These neurons vigorously responded to black edge orientated perpendicular to, and moved in, the preferred direction; the magnitude of visual responses was reduced with changing orientation. The spatial summation occurred in all neurons tested, characterized by the finding that neuronal firings increased as the leading edge was lengthened until saturation was reached. On the other hand, it appeared that nLM neurons could not detect any differences in the shape and area of stimuli with an identical edge. These data suggested that feature extraction characteristics of nLM neurons may be specialized for detecting optokinetic stimuli, but not for realizing pattern recognition. This seems to be at least one of the reasons why large-field gratings or random-dot patterns have been used to study visual responses of accessory optic neurons and optokinetic nystagmus, because many high-contrast edges in these stimuli can activate a neuron to periodically discharge, or groups of neurons to simultaneously fire to elicit optokinetic reflex.
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Guido, W., S. M. Lu, and S. M. Sherman. "Relative contributions of burst and tonic responses to the receptive field properties of lateral geniculate neurons in the cat." Journal of Neurophysiology 68, no. 6 (December 1, 1992): 2199–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1992.68.6.2199.
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1. In an anesthetized, paralyzed in vivo preparation, we recorded extracellular responses of 61 geniculate neurons (2 W, 25 X, 33 Y, and 1 mixed) to drifting sine-wave gratings of various spatial frequency, temporal frequency, and contrast. Our goal was to study the differential contributions to these visual responses of bursting caused by voltage dependent, low-threshold (LT) Ca2+ spikes and of purely tonic responses unrelated to LT spikes. Cells responding with LT spikes are said to be in the burst firing mode and those responding in a purely tonic fashion to be in the relay or tonic firing mode. We separated the total visual response into LT burst and tonic components by use of the empirical criteria set forth in our intracellular study described in the previous paper (Lu et al. 1992). A response component was considered to be an LT burst if its action potentials displayed interspike intervals < or = 4 ms and if the first spike in the burst episode occurred after a silent period of > or = 100 ms (or > or = 50 ms when the neuron responds to visual stimuli at temporal rates > or = 8 Hz). All other activity is considered to be part of the tonic response. 2. In addition to LT bursts, we recognized another type of burst response, the high-threshold (HT) burst. These also have clusters of action potentials with interspike intervals < or = 4 ms. However, HT bursts, unlike LT bursts, lack a preburst silent period. HT bursts are part of the tonic response component and merely reflect the gradual decrease in interspike intervals that occurs as the cell becomes more depolarized and thus more responsive. Thus interspike interval is a necessary but insufficient criterion to identify LT bursts. 3. Visually evoked LT bursts were recorded among W, X, and Y cells. When evoked, LT bursts occurred in phase with drifting sine-wave grating stimuli at a rate never exceeding one per stimulus cycle. In response to individual cycles of the visual stimulus, LT bursts could comprise the total response, a tonic component could comprise the total response, or an LT burst and tonic component could be mixed. When a stimulus evoked a mixture of LT bursts and tonic response components, LT bursts were always the first response. 4. Of the 61 cells tested with grating stimuli, 47 exhibited LT bursts and 14 did not. Those that did exhibited varying amounts of burstiness.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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HAYOT, FERNAND, and DANIEL TRANCHINA. "Modeling corticofugal feedback and the sensitivity of lateral geniculate neurons to orientation discontinuity." Visual Neuroscience 18, no. 6 (November 2001): 865–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523801186037.
Full textAbstract:
We model feedback from primary visual cortex to the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN). This feedback makes dLGN neurons sensitive to orientation discontinuity (Sillito et al., 1993; Cudeiro & Sillito, 1996). In the model, each dLGN neuron receives retinotopic input driven by layer 6 cortical neurons in a full set of orientation columns. Excitation is monosynaptic, while inhibition is through perigeniculate neurons and dLGN interneurons. The stimulus consists of drifting gratings, one within and the other outside a circular region centered over the receptive field of the model dLGN relay neuron we study. They appear as a single grating when they are aligned with equal contrast. The model reproduces experimental results showing an increasing inhibitory effect of feedback on the firing rate of dLGN neurons as the two gratings move towards the aligned position. Moreover, enhancement of dLGN cell center-surround antagonism by feedback is revealed by measuring the responses to drifting gratings inside a circular window, as a function of window radius. This effect is related to the observed length tuning of dLGN cells. Sensitivity to orientation discontinuity could be mediated in the model by feedback from either simple or complex cells. The model puts constraints on the feedback synaptic footprint and shows that its elongated shape does not play a crucial role in sensitivity to orientation discontinuity. The inhibitory component of feedback must predominate overall, but the feedback signal from a cortical neuron to a dLGN neuron with the same or nearby receptive-field center can be dominated by excitation. Predictions of the model include (1) robust stimuli for layer 6 cortical neurons give pronounced nonlinearities in the responses of dLGN neurons; (2) the sensitivity to orientation discontinuity at low contrast is twice that at high contrast.
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Ono, Seiji, and Michael J. Mustari. "Response properties of MST parafoveal neurons during smooth pursuit adaptation." Journal of Neurophysiology 116, no. 1 (July 1, 2016): 210–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00203.2016.
Full textAbstract:
Visual motion neurons in the posterior parietal cortex play a critical role in the guidance of smooth pursuit eye movements. Initial pursuit (open-loop period) is driven, in part, by visual motion signals from cortical areas, such as the medial superior temporal area (MST). The purpose of this study was to determine whether adaptation of initial pursuit gain arises because of altered visual sensitivity of neurons at the cortical level. It is well known that the visual motion response in MST is suppressed after exposure to a large-field visual motion stimulus, showing visual motion adaptation. One hypothesis is that foveal motion responses in MST are associated with smooth pursuit adaptation using a small target spot. We used a step-ramp tracking task with two steps of target velocity (double-step paradigm), which induces gain-down or gain-up adaptation. We found that after gain-down adaptation 58% of our MST visual neurons showed a significant decrease in firing rate. This was the case even though visual motion input (before the pursuit onset) from target motion was constant. Therefore, repetitive visual stimulation during the gain-down paradigm could lead to adaptive changes in the visual response. However, the time course of adaptation did not show a correlation between the visual response and pursuit behavior. These results indicate that the visual response in MST may not directly contribute to the adaptive change in pursuit initiation.
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GAWNE, TIMOTHY J., and JILL M. WOODS. "Video-rate and continuous visual stimuli do not produce equivalent response timings in visual cortical neurons." Visual Neuroscience 20, no. 5 (September 2003): 495–500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523803205034.
Full textAbstract:
Video cathode ray tube (CRT) technology has proven to be extremely valuable for performing research in the visual system. However, the image on a CRT monitor is not constant, but consists of a series of brief pulses. This has implications for any study that explores the responses of neurons in the visual system on short time scales. In particular, there is no unambiguous time point at which a visual stimulus presented via CRT may be said to have ended. Recordings from single units in visual cortical area V1 of an awake primate demonstrate that, when studying changes in response timing on the order of 10 ms or less, stimuli delivered at video frame rates do not duplicate the effects seen with stimuli that have continuous functions of luminance versus time. Additionally, there does not seem to be any clear method of comparing the results obtained with video-rate stimuli with results obtained with continuous-time stimuli that holds for all conditions. These effects are especially critical when exploring the time course of the neuronal responses to the ending of a visual stimulus (off-response). Our findings cast doubt upon the recently reported result that off-responses have consistently shorter latencies than on-responses.
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DiCarlo, James J., and John H. R. Maunsell. "Anterior Inferotemporal Neurons of Monkeys Engaged in Object Recognition Can be Highly Sensitive to Object Retinal Position." Journal of Neurophysiology 89, no. 6 (June 2003): 3264–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00358.2002.
Full textAbstract:
Visual object recognition is computationally difficult because changes in an object's position, distance, pose, or setting may cause it to produce a different retinal image on each encounter. To robustly recognize objects, the primate brain must have mechanisms to compensate for these variations. Although these mechanisms are poorly understood, it is thought that they elaborate neuronal representations in the inferotemporal cortex that are sensitive to object form but substantially invariant to other image variations. This study examines this hypothesis for image variation resulting from changes in object position. We studied the effect of small differences (±1.5°) in the retinal position of small (0.6° wide) visual forms on both the behavior of monkeys trained to identify those forms and the responses of 146 anterior IT (AIT) neurons collected during that behavior. Behavioral accuracy and speed were largely unaffected by these small changes in position. Consistent with previous studies, many AIT responses were highly selective for the forms. However, AIT responses showed far greater sensitivity to retinal position than predicted from their reported receptive field (RF) sizes. The median AIT neuron showed a ∼60% response decrease between positions within ±1.5° of the center of gaze, and 52% of neurons were unresponsive to one or more of these positions. Consistent with previous studies, each neuron's rank order of target preferences was largely unaffected across position changes. Although we have not yet determined the conditions necessary to observe this marked position sensitivity in AIT responses, we rule out effects of spatial-frequency content, eye movements, and failures to include the RF center. To reconcile this observation with previous studies, we hypothesize that either AIT position sensitivity strongly depends on object size or that position sensitivity is sharpened by extensive visual experience at fixed retinal positions or by the presence of flanking distractors.
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Michel, Melchi M., and Robert A. Jacobs. "The Costs of Ignoring High-Order Correlations in Populations of Model Neurons." Neural Computation 18, no. 3 (March 1, 2006): 660–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/neco.2006.18.3.660.
Full textAbstract:
Investigators debate the extent to which neural populations use pairwise and higher-order statistical dependencies among neural responses to represent information about a visual stimulus. To study this issue, three statistical decoders were used to extract the information in the responses of model neurons about the binocular disparities present in simulated pairs of left-eye and right-eye images: (1) the full joint probability decoder considered all possible statistical relations among neural responses as potentially important; (2) the dependence tree decoder also considered all possible relations as potentially important, but it approximated high-order statistical correlations using a computationally tractable procedure; and (3) the independent response decoder, which assumed that neural responses are statistically independent, meaning that all correlations should be zero and thus can be ignored. Simulation results indicate that high-order correlations among model neuron responses contain significant information about binocular disparities and that the amount of this high-order information increases rapidly as a function of neural population size. Furthermore, the results highlight the potential importance of the dependence tree decoder to neuroscientists as a powerful but still practical way of approximating high-order correlations among neural responses.
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Jiang, Wan, Mark T. Wallace, Huai Jiang, J. William Vaughan, and Barry E. Stein. "Two Cortical Areas Mediate Multisensory Integration in Superior Colliculus Neurons." Journal of Neurophysiology 85, no. 2 (February 1, 2001): 506–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.2001.85.2.506.
Full textAbstract:
The majority of multisensory neurons in the cat superior colliculus (SC) are able to synthesize cross-modal cues (e.g., visual and auditory) and thereby produce responses greater than those elicited by the most effective single modality stimulus and, sometimes, greater than those predicted by the arithmetic sum of their modality-specific responses. The present study examined the role of corticotectal inputs from two cortical areas, the anterior ectosylvian sulcus (AES) and the rostral aspect of the lateral suprasylvian sulcus (rLS), in producing these response enhancements. This was accomplished by evaluating the multisensory properties of individual SC neurons during reversible deactivation of these cortices individually and in combination using cryogenic deactivation techniques. Cortical deactivation eliminated the characteristic multisensory response enhancement of nearly all SC neurons but generally had little or no effect on a neuron's modality-specific responses. Thus, the responses of SC neurons to combinations of cross-modal stimuli were now no different from those evoked by one or the other of these stimuli individually. Of the two cortical areas, AES had a much greater impact on SC multisensory integrative processes, with nearly half the SC neurons sampled dependent on it alone. In contrast, only a small number of SC neurons depended solely on rLS. However, most SC neurons exhibited dual dependencies, and their multisensory enhancement was mediated by either synergistic or redundant influences from AES and rLS. Corticotectal synergy was evident when deactivating either cortical area compromised the multisensory enhancement of an SC neuron, whereas corticotectal redundancy was evident when deactivation of both cortical areas was required to produce this effect. The results suggest that, although multisensory SC neurons can be created as a consequence of a variety of converging tectopetal afferents that are derived from a host of subcortical and cortical structures, the ability to synthesize cross-modal inputs, and thereby produce an enhanced multisensory response, requires functional inputs from the AES, the rLS, or both.
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Suzuki, D. A., J. G. May, E. L. Keller, and R. D. Yee. "Visual motion response properties of neurons in dorsolateral pontine nucleus of alert monkey." Journal of Neurophysiology 63, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 37–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1990.63.1.37.
Full textAbstract:
1. In this study we sought to characterize the visual motion processing that exists in the dorsolateral pontine nucleus (DLPN) and make a comparison with the reported visual responses of the middle temporal (MT) and medial superior temporal (MST) areas of the monkey cerebral cortex. The DLPN is implicated as a component of the visuomotor interface involved with the regulation of smooth-pursuit eye movements, because it is a major terminus for afferents from MT and MST and also the source of efferents to cerebellar regions involved with eye-movement control. 2. Some DLPN cells were preferentially responsive to discrete (spot and bar) visual stimuli, or to large-field, random-dot pattern motion, or to both discrete and large-field visual motion. The results suggest differential input from localized regions of MT and MST. 3. The visual-motion responses of DLPN neurons were direction selective for 86% of the discrete visual responses and 95% of the large-field responses. Direction tuning bandwidths (full-width at 50% maximum response amplitude) averaged 107 degrees and 120 degrees for discrete and large-field visual motion responses, respectively. For the two visual response types, the direction index averaged 0.95 and 1.02, indicating that responses to stimuli moving in preferred directions were, on average, 20 and 50 times greater than responses to discrete or large-field stimulus movement in the opposite directions, respectively. 4. Most of the DLPN visual responses to movements of discrete visual stimuli exhibited increases in amplitude up to preferred retinal image speeds between 20 and 80 degrees/s, with an average preferred speed of 39 degrees/s. At higher speeds, the response amplitude of most units decreased, although a few units exhibited a broad saturation in response amplitude that was maintained up to at least 150 degrees/s before the response decreased. Over the range of speeds up to the preferred speeds, the sensitivity of DLPN neurons to discrete stimulus-related, retinal-image speed averaged 3.0 spikes/s per deg/s. The responses to large-field visual motion were less sensitive to retinal image speed and exhibited an average sensitivity of 1.4 spikes/s per deg/s before the visual response saturated. 5. DLPN and MT were quantitatively comparable with respect to degree of direction selectivity, retinal image speed tuning, and distribution of preferred speeds. Many DLPN receptive fields contained the fovea and were larger than those of MT and more like MST receptive fields in size.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Matsushima, Ayano, and Masaki Tanaka. "Neuronal Correlates of Multiple Top–Down Signals during Covert Tracking of Moving Objects in Macaque Prefrontal Cortex." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24, no. 10 (October 2012): 2043–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00265.
Full textAbstract:
Resistance to distraction is a key component of executive functions and is strongly linked to the prefrontal cortex. Recent evidence suggests that neural mechanisms exist for selective suppression of task-irrelevant information. However, neuronal signals related to selective suppression have not yet been identified, whereas nonselective surround suppression, which results from attentional enhancement for relevant stimuli, has been well documented. This study examined single neuron activities in the lateral PFC when monkeys covertly tracked one of randomly moving objects. Although many neurons responded to the target, we also found a group of neurons that exhibited a selective response to the distractor that was visually identical to the target. Because most neurons were insensitive to an additional distractor that explicitly differed in color from the target, the brain seemed to monitor the distractor only when necessary to maintain internal object segregation. Our results suggest that the lateral PFC might provide at least two top–down signals during covert object tracking: one for enhancement of visual processing for the target and the other for selective suppression of visual processing for the distractor. These signals might work together to discriminate objects, thereby regulating both the sensitivity and specificity of target choice during covert object tracking.
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Motter, B. C. "Focal attention produces spatially selective processing in visual cortical areas V1, V2, and V4 in the presence of competing stimuli." Journal of Neurophysiology 70, no. 3 (September 1, 1993): 909–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1993.70.3.909.
Full textAbstract:
1. The activity of single neurons was recorded in Macaca mulatta monkeys while they performed tasks requiring them to select a cued stimulus from an array of three to eight stimuli and report the orientation of that stimulus. Stimuli were presented in a circular array centered on the fixation target and scaled to place a single stimulus element within the receptive field of the neuron under study. The timing of the cuing event permitted the directing of visual attention to the spatial location of the correct stimulus before its presentation. 2. The effects of focal attention were examined in cortical visual areas V1, V2, and V4, where a total of 672 neurons were isolated with complete studies obtained for 94 V1, 74 V2, and 74 V4 neurons with receptive-field center eccentricities in the range 1.8-8 degrees. Under certain conditions, directed focal attention results in changes in the response of V1, V2, and V4 neurons to otherwise identical stimuli at spatially specific locations. 3. More than one-third of the neurons in each area displayed differential sensitivity when attention was directed toward versus away from the spatial location of the receptive field just before and during stimulus presentation. Both relative increases and decreases in neural activity were observed in association with attention directed at receptive-field stimuli. 4. The presence of multiple competing stimuli in the visual field was a major factor determining the presence or absence of differential sensitivity. About two-thirds of the neurons that were differentially sensitive to the attending condition in the presence of competing stimuli were not differentially sensitive when single stimuli were presented in control studies. For V1 and V2 neurons the presence of only a few (3-4) competing stimuli was sufficient for a majority of the neurons studied; a majority of the V4 neurons required six to eight stimuli in the array before significant differences between attending conditions occurred. 5. For V1 and V2 neurons the neuronal sensitivity differences between attending conditions were observed primarily at or near the peak of the orientation tuning sensitivity for each neuron; the differences were evident over a broader range of orientations in V4 neurons. 6. In conclusion, neural correlates of focal attentive processes can be observed in visual cortical processing in areas V1 and V2 as well as area V4 under conditions that require stimulus feature analysis and selective spatial processing within a field of competing stimuli.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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Guest, Bruce B., and John R. Gray. "Responses of a Looming-Sensitive Neuron to Compound and Paired Object Approaches." Journal of Neurophysiology 95, no. 3 (March 2006): 1428–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.01037.2005.
Full textAbstract:
The lobula giant movement detector (LGMD) and its target neuron, the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD), constitute a motion-sensitive pathway in the locust visual system that responds preferentially to objects approaching on a collision course. LGMD receptive field properties, anisotropic distribution of local retinotopic inputs across the visual field, and localized habituation to repeated stimuli suggest that this pathway should be sensitive to approaches of individual objects within a complex visual scene. We presented locusts with compound looming objects while recording from the DCMD to test the effects of nonuniform edge expansion on looming responses. We also presented paired objects approaching from different regions of the visual field at nonoverlapping, closely timed and simultaneous approach intervals to study DCMD responses to multiple looming stimuli. We found that looming compound objects evoked characteristic responses in the DCMD and that the time of peak firing was consistent with predicted values based on a weighted ratio of the half size of each distinct object edge and the absolute approach velocity. We also found that the azimuthal position and interval of paired approaches affected DCMD firing properties and that DCMDs responded to individual objects approaching within 106 ms of each other. Moreover, comparisons between individual and paired approaches revealed that overlapping approaches are processed in a strongly sublinear manner. These findings are consistent with biophysical mechanisms that produce nonlinear integration of excitatory and feed-forward inhibitory inputs onto the LGMD that have been shown to underlie responses to looming stimuli.
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Hung, Y. S., J. P. van Kleef, G. Stange, and M. R. Ibbotson. "Spectral inputs and ocellar contributions to a pitch-sensitive descending neuron in the honeybee." Journal of Neurophysiology 109, no. 4 (February 15, 2013): 1202–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00830.2012.
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By measuring insect compensatory optomotor reflexes to visual motion, researchers have examined the computational mechanisms of the motion processing system. However, establishing the spectral sensitivity of the neural pathways that underlie this motion behavior has been difficult, and the contribution of the simple eyes (ocelli) has been rarely examined. In this study we investigate the spectral response properties and ocellar inputs of an anatomically identified descending neuron (DNII2) in the honeybee optomotor pathway. Using a panoramic stimulus, we show that it responds selectively to optic flow associated with pitch rotations. The neuron is also stimulated with a custom-built light-emitting diode array that presented moving bars that were either all-green (spectrum 500–600 nm, peak 530 nm) or all-short wavelength (spectrum 350–430 nm, peak 380 nm). Although the optomotor response is thought to be dominated by green-sensitive inputs, we show that DNII2 is equally responsive to, and direction selective to, both green- and short-wavelength stimuli. The color of the background image also influences the spontaneous spiking behavior of the cell: a green background produces significantly higher spontaneous spiking rates. Stimulating the ocelli produces strong modulatory effects on DNII2, significantly increasing the amplitude of its responses in the preferred motion direction and decreasing the response latency by adding a directional, short-latency response component. Our results suggest that the spectral sensitivity of the optomotor response in honeybees may be more complicated than previously thought and that ocelli play a significant role in shaping the timing of motion signals.
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Krapp, Holger G., and Fabrizio Gabbiani. "Spatial Distribution of Inputs and Local Receptive Field Properties of a Wide-Field, Looming Sensitive Neuron." Journal of Neurophysiology 93, no. 4 (April 2005): 2240–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00965.2004.
Full textAbstract:
The lobula giant movement detector (LGMD) in the locust visual system and its target neuron, the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD), respond to approaching objects looming on a collision course with the animal. They thus provide a good model to study the cellular and network mechanisms underlying the sensitivity to this specific class of behaviorally relevant stimuli. We determined over an entire locust eye the density distribution of optical axes describing the spatial organization of local inputs to the visual system and compared it with the sensitivity distribution of the LGMD/DCMD to local motion stimuli. The density of optical axes peaks in the equatorial region of the frontal eye. Local motion sensitivity, however, peaks in the equatorial region of the caudolateral visual field and only correlates positively with the dorso-ventral density of optical axes. On local stimulation, both the velocity tuning and the response latency of the LGMD/DCMD depend on stimulus position within the visual field. Spatial and temporal integration experiments in which several local motion stimuli were activated either simultaneously or at fixed delays reveal that the LGMD processes local motion in a strongly sublinear way. Thus the neuron's integration properties seem to depend on several factors including its dendritic morphology, the local characteristics of afferent fiber inputs, and inhibition mediated by different pathways or by voltage-gated conductances. Our study shows that the selectivity of this looming sensitive neuron to approaching objects relies on more complex biophysical mechanisms than previously thought.
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Obara, Keitaro, Kazunori O’Hashi, and Manabu Tanifuji. "Mechanisms for shaping receptive field in monkey area TE." Journal of Neurophysiology 118, no. 4 (October 1, 2017): 2448–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00348.2017.
Full textAbstract:
Visual object information is conveyed from V1 to area TE along the ventral visual pathway with increasing receptive field (RF) sizes. The RFs of TE neurons are known to be large, but it is largely unknown how large RFs are shaped along the ventral visual pathway. In this study, we addressed this question in two aspects, static and dynamic mechanisms, by recording neural responses from macaque area TE and V4 to object stimuli presented at various locations in the visual field. As a component related to static mechanisms, we found that in area TE, but not in V4, response latency to objects presented at fovea were different from objects in periphery. As a component of the dynamic mechanisms, we examined effects of spatial attention on the RFs of TE neurons. Spatial attention did not affect response latency but modulated response magnitudes depending on attended location, shifting of the longitudinal axis of RFs toward the attended locations. In standard models of large RF formation, downstream neurons pool information from nearby RFs, and this process is repeated across the visual field and at each step along the ventral visual pathway. The present study revealed that this mechanism is not that simple: 1) different circuit mechanisms for foveal and peripheral visual fields may be situated between V4 and area TE, and 2) spatial attention dynamically changes the shape of RFs. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Receptive fields (RFs) of neurons are progressively increased along the ventral visual pathway so that an RF at the final stage, area TE, covers a large area of the visual field. We explored the mechanism and suggested involvement of parallel circuit mechanisms between V4 and TE for foveal and peripheral parts of visual field. We also found a dynamic component of RF shape formation through attentional modulation of responses in a location-dependent manner.
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Germi, James, Oceane Fruchet, John Wolf, and Isaac Chen. "21813 Changes in Electrophysiologic Activity in the Rat Visual Cortex following Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)." Journal of Clinical and Translational Science 5, s1 (March 2021): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cts.2021.425.
Full textAbstract:
ABSTRACT IMPACT: This research aims to identify changes in visual network function after TBI as a way to define potential therapeutic targets for neuromodulation or neural tissue substrates. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The objectives of this study are to compare neural activity in the visual cortex following TBI with cortical activity in the uninjured brain. This study aims to characterize functional changes in single neuron activity, spike-field relationships and oscillatory activity. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The effects of TBI will be studied by comparing electrophysiologic recordings from Long-Evans rats with a fluid percussion injury (FPI) to rats with a sham injury. Four days after the injury or sham procedure, a laminar probe with multiple electrode contacts will be chronically implanted in the ipsilesional primary visual cortex (V1). Afterwards, rats will be anesthetized weekly for 3 weeks (up to 4 weeks post-injury) to assess visual processing in response to drifting grating visual stimulation. To assess behavioral correlates, neural activity will also be recorded while rats perform a visual discrimination task in an operant, touchscreen chamber twice weekly. Recordings will be analyzed for visually evoked units, unit entrainment to local field potentials (LFPs) and evoked oscillatory activity. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Consistent with other studies, our preliminary evidence from V1 recordings in naive rats has shown that individual neurons are responsive to visual stimuli, visual stimuli are associated with evoked oscillations and unit activity is correlated with LFPs. While activity of individual V1 neurons in injured animals is expected to recover to resemble activity in uninjured animals over time, patterns of functional organization in the two groups are expected to diverge over time. We anticipate that TBI-associated axonal damage, neuronal loss and changes in synaptic weights will lead to disruptions in the timing of neural activity in V1. These perturbations of neural communication within the visual system are expected to be associated with behavioral deficits in the awake, visual discrimination task. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: This study helps define how cortical network disruption after TBI. These changes are potential targets for novel TBI therapeutics, including neuromodulation and neural tissue transplantation. Thus, this work lays the groundwork for future studies aimed at mitigating the effects of TBI with rationally designed experimental therapeutics.
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McClure, John P., and Pierre-Olivier Polack. "Pure tones modulate the representation of orientation and direction in the primary visual cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 121, no. 6 (June 1, 2019): 2202–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00069.2019.
Full textAbstract:
Multimodal sensory integration facilitates the generation of a unified and coherent perception of the environment. It is now well established that unimodal sensory perceptions, such as vision, are improved in multisensory contexts. Whereas multimodal integration is primarily performed by dedicated multisensory brain regions such as the association cortices or the superior colliculus, recent studies have shown that multisensory interactions also occur in primary sensory cortices. In particular, sounds were shown to modulate the responses of neurons located in layers 2/3 (L2/3) of the mouse primary visual cortex (V1). Yet, the net effect of sound modulation at the V1 population level remained unclear. In the present study, we performed two-photon calcium imaging in awake mice to compare the representation of the orientation and the direction of drifting gratings by V1 L2/3 neurons in unimodal (visual only) or multimodal (audiovisual) conditions. We found that sound modulation depended on the tuning properties (orientation and direction selectivity) and response amplitudes of V1 L2/3 neurons. Sounds potentiated the responses of neurons that were highly tuned to the cue’s orientation and direction but weakly active in the unimodal context, following the principle of inverse effectiveness of multimodal integration. Moreover, sound suppressed the responses of neurons untuned for the orientation and/or the direction of the visual cue. Altogether, sound modulation improved the representation of the orientation and direction of the visual stimulus in V1 L2/3. Namely, visual stimuli presented with auditory stimuli recruited a neuronal population better tuned to the visual stimulus orientation and direction than when presented alone. NEW & NOTEWORTHY The primary visual cortex (V1) receives direct inputs from the primary auditory cortex. Yet, the impact of sounds on visual processing in V1 remains controverted. We show that the modulation by pure tones of V1 visual responses depends on the orientation selectivity, direction selectivity, and response amplitudes of V1 neurons. Hence, audiovisual stimuli recruit a population of V1 neurons better tuned to the orientation and direction of the visual stimulus than unimodal visual stimuli.
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Rind, F. C. "Intracellular characterization of neurons in the locust brain signaling impending collision." Journal of Neurophysiology 75, no. 3 (March 1, 1996): 986–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.1996.75.3.986.
Full textAbstract:
1. In response to a rapidly approaching object, intracellular recordings show that excitation in the locust lobula giant movement detecting (LGMD) neuron builds up exponentially, particularly during the final stages of object approach. After the cessation of object motion, inhibitory potentials in the LGMD then help to terminate this excitation. Excitation in the LGMD follows object recession with a short, constant latency but is cut back rapidly by hyperpolarizing potentials. The timing of these hyperpolarizing potentials in the LGMD is variable, and their latency following object recession is shortest with the highest velocities of motion simulated. The hyperpolarizing potentials last from 50-300 ms and are often followed by re-excitation. The observed hyperpolarizations of the LGMD can occur without any preceding excitation and are accompanied by a measurable conductance increase. The hyperpolarizations are likely to be inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (PSPs). The behavior of the intracellularly recorded inhibitory PSPs (IPSPs) closely parallels that of the feed forward inhibitory loop in the neural network described by Rind and Bramwell. 2. The preference of the LGMD for approaching versus receding objects remains over a wide range of starting and finishing distances. The response to object approach, measured both as membrane potential and spike rate, remains single peaked with starting distances of between 200 and 2,100 mm, and approach speeds of 0.5-2 m/s. These results confirm the behavior predicted by the neural network described by Rind and Bramwell but contradicts the findings of Rind and Simmons, forcing a re-evaluation of the suitability of some of the mechanical visual stimuli used in that study. 3. For depolarization of the LGMD neuron to be maintained or increased throughout the motion of image edges, the edges must move with increasing velocity over the eye. Membrane potential declines before the end of edge motion with constant velocities of edge motion. 4. A second identified neuron, the LGMD2 also is shown to respond directionally to approaching objects. In both the LGMD and LGMD2 neurons, postsynaptic inhibition shapes the directional response to object motion.