scholarly journals Retinotopic Organization of Scene Areas in Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Arcaro ◽  
Margaret S. Livingstone

ABSTRACTPrimates have specialized domains in inferior temporal (IT) cortex that are responsive to particular image categories. Though IT traditionally has been regarded as lacking retinotopy, several recent studies in monkeys have shown that retinotopic maps extend to face patches along the lower bank of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) in IT cortex. Here, we confirm the presence of visual field maps within and around the lower bank of the STS and extend these prior findings to scene-selective cortex in the ventral-most regions of IT. Within the occipito-temporal sulcus (OTS), we identified two retinotopic areas, OTS1 and OTS2. The polar angle representation of OTS2 was a mirror reversal of the OTS1 representation. These regions contained representations of the contralateral periphery and were selectively active for scene vs. face, body, or object images. The extent of this retinotopy parallels that in humans and shows that the organization of the scene network is preserved across primate species. In addition retinotopic maps were identified in dorsal extrastriate, posterior parietal, and frontal cortex as well as the thalamus, including both the LGN and pulvinar. Taken together, it appears that most, if not all, of the macaque visual system contains organized representations of visual space.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTPrimates have specialized domains in inferior temporal (IT) cortex that are responsive to particular image categories. Though retinotopic maps are considered a fundamental organizing principle of posterior visual cortex, IT traditionally has been regarded as lacking retinotopy. Recent imaging studies have demonstrated the presence of several visual field maps within lateral IT. Using neuroimaging, we found multiple representations of visual space within ventral IT cortex of macaques that included scene-selective IT cortex. The scene domains were biased towards the peripheral visual field. These data demonstrate the prevalence of visual field maps throughout the primate visual system, including late stages in the ventral visual hierarchy, and support the idea that domains representing different categories are biased towards different parts of the visual field.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.M. van Es ◽  
W. van der Zwaag ◽  
T. Knapen

While the cerebellum is instrumental for motor control, it is not traditionally implicated in vision. Here, we report the existence of 5 ipsilateral visual field maps in the human cerebellum. These maps are located within the oculomotor vermis and cerebellar nodes of the dorsal attention and visual networks. These findings imply that the cerebellum is closely involved in visuospatial cognition, and that its contributions are anchored in sensory coordinates.


eLife ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J Arcaro ◽  
Margaret S Livingstone

The adult primate visual system comprises a series of hierarchically organized areas. Each cortical area contains a topographic map of visual space, with different areas extracting different kinds of information from the retinal input. Here we asked to what extent the newborn visual system resembles the adult organization. We find that hierarchical, topographic organization is present at birth and therefore constitutes a proto-organization for the entire primate visual system. Even within inferior temporal cortex, this proto-organization was already present, prior to the emergence of category selectivity (e.g., faces or scenes). We propose that this topographic organization provides the scaffolding for the subsequent development of visual cortex that commences at the onset of visual experience


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian A. Dehmelt ◽  
Rebecca Meier ◽  
Julian Hinz ◽  
Takeshi Yoshimatsu ◽  
Clara A. Simacek ◽  
...  

AbstractMany animals have large visual fields, and sensory circuits may sample those regions of visual space most relevant to behaviours such as gaze stabilisation and hunting. Despite this, relatively small displays are often used in vision neuroscience. To sample stimulus locations across most of the visual field, we built a spherical stimulus arena with 14,848 independently controllable LEDs, measured the optokinetic response gain of immobilised zebrafish larvae, and related behaviour to previously published retinal photoreceptor densities. We measured tuning to steradian stimulus size and spatial frequency, and show it to be independent of visual field position. However, zebrafish react most strongly and consistently to lateral, nearly equatorial stimuli, consistent with previously reported higher spatial densities in the central retina of red, green and blue photoreceptors. Upside-down experiments suggest further extra-retinal processing. Our results demonstrate that motion vision circuits in zebrafish are anisotropic, and preferentially monitor areas with putative behavioural relevance.Author summaryThe visual system of larval zebrafish mirrors many features present in the visual system of other vertebrates, including its ability to mediate optomotor and optokinetic behaviour. Although the presence of such behaviours and some of the underlying neural correlates have been firmly established, previous experiments did not consider the large visual field of zebrafish, which covers more than 160° for each eye. Given that different parts of the visual field likely carry unequal amount of behaviourally relevant information for the animal, this raises the question whether optic flow is integrated across the entire visual field or just parts of it, and how this shapes behaviour such as the optokinetic response. We constructed a spherical LED arena to present visual stimuli almost anywhere across their visual field, while tracking horizontal eye movements. By displaying moving gratings on this LED arena, we demonstrate that the optokinetic response, one of the most prominent visually induced behaviours of zebrafish, indeed strongly depends on stimulus location and stimulus size, as well as on other parameters such as the spatial and temporal frequency of the gratings. This location dependence is consistent with areas of high retinal photoreceptor densities, though evidence suggests further extraretinal processing.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Winawer ◽  
Nathan Witthoft

The location and topography of the first three visual field maps in the human brain, V1-V3, are well agreed upon and routinely measured across most laboratories. The position of 4th visual field map, "hV4", is identified with less consistency in the neuroimaging literature. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, we describe landmarks to help identify the position and borders of hV4. The data consist of anatomical images, visualized as cortical meshes to highlight the sulcal and gyral patterns, and functional data obtained from retinotopic mapping experiments, visualized as eccentricity and angle maps on the cortical surface. Several features of the functional and anatomical data can be found across nearly all subjects and are helpful for identifying the location and extent of the hV4 map. The medial border of hV4 is shared with the posterior, ventral portion of V3, and is marked by a retinotopic representation of the upper vertical meridian. The anterior border of hV4 is shared with the VO-1 map, and falls on a retinotopic representation of the peripheral visual field, usually coincident with the posterior transverse collateral sulcus. The ventro-lateral edge of the map typically falls on the inferior occipital gyrus, where functional MRI artifacts often obscure the retinotopic data. Finally, we demonstrate the continuity of retinotopic parameters between hV4 and its neighbors; hV4 and V3v contain iso-eccentricity lines in register, whereas hV4 and VO-1 contain iso-polar angle lines in register. Together, the multiple constraints allow for a consistent identification of the hV4 map across most human subjects.


1998 ◽  
Vol 80 (6) ◽  
pp. 2918-2940 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Chelazzi ◽  
John Duncan ◽  
Earl K. Miller ◽  
Robert Desimone

Chelazzi, Leonardo, John Duncan, Earl K. Miller, and Robert Desimone. Responses of neurons in inferior temporal cortex during memory-guided visual search. J. Neurophysiol. 80: 2918–2940, 1998. A typical scene will contain many different objects, few of which are relevant to behavior at any given moment. Thus attentional mechanisms are needed to select relevant objects for visual processing and control over behavior. We examined this role of attention in the inferior temporal cortex of macaque monkeys, using a visual search paradigm. While the monkey maintained fixation, a cue stimulus was presented at the center of gaze, followed by a blank delay period. After the delay, an array of two to five choice stimuli was presented extrafoveally, and the monkey was rewarded for detecting a target stimulus matching the cue. The behavioral response was a saccadic eye movement to the target in one version of the task and a lever release in another. The array was composed of one “good” stimulus (effective in driving the cell when presented alone) and one or more “poor” stimuli (ineffective in driving the cell when presented alone). Most cells showed higher delay activity after a good stimulus used as the cue than after a poor stimulus. The baseline activity of cells was also higher preceding a good cue, if the animal expected it to occur. This activity may depend on a top-down bias in favor of cells coding the relevant stimulus. When the choice array was presented, most cells showed suppressive interactions between the stimuli as well as strong attention effects. When the choice array was presented in the contralateral visual field, most cells initially responded the same, regardless of which stimulus was the target. However, within 150–200 ms of array onset, responses were determined by the target stimulus. If the target was the good stimulus, the response to the array became equal to the response to the good stimulus presented alone. If the target was a poor stimulus, the response approached the response to that stimulus presented alone. Thus the influence of the nontarget stimulus was eliminated. These effects occurred well in advance of the behavioral response. When the array was positioned with stimuli on opposite sides of the vertical meridian, the contralateral stimulus appeared to dominate the response, and this dominant effect could not be overcome by attention. Overall, the results support a “biased competition” model of attention, according to which 1) objects in the visual field compete for representation in the cortex, and 2) this competition is biased in favor of the behaviorally relevant object by virtue of “top-down” feedback from structures involved in working memory.


2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 2585-2596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon M. Stringer ◽  
Edmund T. Rolls

To form view-invariant representations of objects, neurons in the inferior temporal cortex may associate together different views of an object, which tend to occur close together in time under natural viewing conditions. This can be achieved in neuronal network models of this process by using an associative learning rule with a short-term temporal memory trace. It is postulated that within a view, neurons learn representations that enable them to generalize within variations of that view. When three-dimensional (3D) objects are rotated within small angles (up to, e.g., 30 degrees), their surface features undergo geometric distortion due to the change of perspective. In this article, we show how trace learning could solve the problem of in-depth rotation-invariant object recognition by developing representations of the transforms that features undergo when they are on the surfaces of 3D objects. Moreover, we show that having learned how features on 3D objects transform geometrically as the object is rotated in depth, the network can correctly recognize novel 3D variations within a generic view of an object composed of a new combination of previously learned features. These results are demonstrated in simulations of a hierarchical network model (VisNet) of the visual system that show that it can develop representations useful for the recognition of 3D objects by forming perspective-invariant representations to allow generalization within a generic view.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc M. Himmelberg ◽  
Jan W. Kurzawski ◽  
Noah C. Benson ◽  
Denis G. Pelli ◽  
Marisa Carrasco ◽  
...  

AbstractPopulation receptive field (pRF) models fit to fMRI data are used to non-invasively measure retinotopic maps in human visual cortex, and these maps are a fundamental component of visual neuroscience experiments. We examined the reproducibility of retinotopic maps across two datasets: a newly acquired retinotopy dataset from New York University (NYU) (n=44) and a public dataset from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) (n=181). Our goal was to assess the degree to which pRF properties are similar across datasets, despite substantial differences in their experimental protocols. The two datasets differ in stimulus design, participant pool, fMRI protocol, MRI field strength, and preprocessing pipelines. We assessed the cross-dataset reproducibility of the two datasets in terms of the similarity of vertex-wise pRF estimates and in terms of large-scale cortical magnification properties. Within V1, V2, V3, and hV4, the group-median NYU and HCP vertex-wise polar angle estimates were nearly identical. Both eccentricity and pRF size estimates were also strongly correlated between the two datasets, but with a slope different from 1; the eccentricity and pRF size estimates were systematically greater in the NYU data. Next, to compare large-scale map properties, we quantified two polar angle asymmetries in V1 cortical magnification previously identified in the HCP data. The prior work reported more cortical surface area representing the horizontal than vertical visual field meridian, and the lower than upper vertical visual field meridian. We confirm both of these results in the NYU dataset. Together, our findings show that the retinotopic properties of V1-hV4 can be reliably measured between two datasets, despite numerous differences in their experimental design. fMRI-derived retinotopic maps are reproducible because they rely on an explicit computational model that is grounded in physiological evidence of how visual receptive fields are organized, allowing one to quantitatively characterize the BOLD signal in terms of stimulus properties (i.e., location and size). The new NYU Retinotopy Dataset will serve as a useful benchmark for testing hypotheses about the organization of visual areas and for comparison to the HCP Retinotopy Dataset.


1988 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 344-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Sato

1. Extracellular discharges were recorded from neurons in the inferior temporal cortex (area TE) of three macaque monkeys while they performed visual fixation and pattern discrimination tasks. For the pattern discrimination task, monkey was trained to release the lever quickly at the onset of one of two pattern stimuli and to release the lever at the dimming of the other pattern. During this task, neutral light stimulus (light bar) to which the monkey was not required to respond was presented once a trial either prior to the onset of the discriminandum or during presentation of the pattern that dimmed later. The neuronal activities evoked by the neutral stimulus under these two conditions were compared. 2. When the discriminanda were located at the center or at 5 degrees in the contralateral visual field, one-half of the neurons showed significantly smaller responses to the neutral stimulus when it was presented during presentation of the dimming pattern than when it was presented prior to the onset of the discriminandum. 3. The suppressive effect depended on the location of the two stimuli. When the neutral stimulus was located in the ipsilateral visual field and the pattern was located in the contralateral visual field, the response to the neutral stimulus was suppressed. However, when the pattern was located in the ipsilateral visual field (5 degrees visual angle), still within the receptive field for many neurons, the suppressive effect of the pattern on the response to the neutral stimulus in the contralateral visual field was almost undetectable. 4. When the pattern was located nearer the fovea than was the neutral stimulus, the suppressive effect was greater than when the pattern was located more peripherally to the neutral stimulus. Different from the receptive field of more primary visual neurons, this suppressive effect did not appear to be related to the neuron's responsiveness to the patterns nor to precise stimulus location in the receptive field. 5. The magnitude of suppression by the attended pattern on the visual response during the pattern discrimination task correlated with the suppression noted in the presence of a fixation spot during the fixation tasks, while the animals did not fixate on the attended pattern. The response of some neurons to the neutral stimulus prior to pattern presentation during the pattern discrimination task was enhanced slightly compared with the response recorded during the simple fixation task.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


F1000Research ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Winawer ◽  
Nathan Witthoft

The location and topography of the first three visual field maps in the human brain, V1-V3, are well agreed upon and routinely measured across most laboratories. The position of 4th visual field map, ‘hV4’, is identified with less consistency in the neuroimaging literature.  Using magnetic resonance imaging data, we describe landmarks to help identify the position and borders of ‘hV4’. The data consist of anatomical images, visualized as cortical meshes to highlight the sulcal and gyral patterns, and functional data obtained from retinotopic mapping experiments, visualized as eccentricity and angle maps on the cortical surface. Several features of the functional and anatomical data can be found across nearly all subjects and are helpful for identifying the location and extent of the hV4 map. The medial border of hV4 is shared with the posterior, ventral portion of V3, and is marked by a retinotopic representation of the upper vertical meridian. The anterior border of hV4 is shared with the VO-1 map, and falls on a retinotopic representation of the peripheral visual field, usually coincident with the posterior transverse collateral sulcus. The ventro-lateral edge of the map typically falls on the inferior occipital gyrus, where functional MRI artifacts often obscure the retinotopic data. Finally, we demonstrate the continuity of retinotopic parameters between hV4 and its neighbors; hV4 and V3v contain iso-eccentricity lines in register, whereas hV4 and VO-1 contain iso-polar angle lines in register. Together, the multiple constraints allow for a consistent identification of the hV4 map across most human subjects.


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