scholarly journals Contrasts in spatial organization of receptive fields at geniculate and retinal levels: centre surround and outer surround

1973 ◽  
Vol 228 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Hammond
1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Dreher ◽  
A. Michalski ◽  
R. H. T. Ho ◽  
C. W. F. Lee ◽  
W. Burke

AbstractExtracellular recordings from single neurons have been made from presumed area 21a of the cerebral cortex of the cat, anesthetized with N2O/O2/sodium pentobarbitone mixture. Area 21a contains mainly a representation of a central horizontal strip of contralateral visual field about 5 deg above and below the horizontal meridian.Excitatory discharge fields of area 21a neurons were substantially (or slightly but significantly) larger than those of neurons at corresponding eccentricities in areas 17, 19, or 18, respectively. About 95% of area 21a neurons could be activated through either eye and the input from the ipsilateral eye was commonly dominant. Over 90% and less than 10% of neurons had, respectively, C-type and S-type receptive-field organization. Virtually all neurons were orientation-selective and the mean width at half-height of the orientation tuning curves at 52.9 deg was not significantly different from that of neurons in areas 17 and 18. About 30% of area 21a neurons had preferred orientations within 15 deg of the vertical.The mean direction-selectivity index (32.8%) of area 21a neurons was substantially lower than the indices for neurons in areas 17 or 18. Only a few neurons exhibited moderately strong end-zone inhibition. Area 21a neurons responded poorly to fast-moving stimuli and the mean preferred velocity at about 12.5 deg/s was not significantly different from that for area 17 neurons.Selective pressure block of Y fibers in contralateral optic nerve resulted in a small but significant reduction in the preferred velocities of neurons activated via the Y-blocked eye. By contrast, removal of the Y input did not produce significant changes in the spatial organization of receptive fields (S or C type), the size of the discharge fields, the width of orientation tuning curves, or direction-selectivity indices.Our results are consistent with the idea that area 21a receives its principal excitatory input from area 17 and is involved mainly in form rather than motion analysis.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaeson Jang ◽  
Min Song ◽  
Gwangsu Kim ◽  
Se-Bum Paik

AbstractIn higher mammals, the primary visual cortex (V1) is organized into diverse tuning maps of visual features such as orientation, spatial frequency and ocular dominance. The topography of these maps is observed to intersect orthogonally, implying that a developmental principle for efficient tiling of sensory modules may exist. However, it remains unclear how such a systematic relationship among cortical tuning maps could develop. Here, we show that the orthogonal organization of tuning modules already exist in retinal ganglion cell (RGC) mosaics, and that this provides a blueprint of the orthogonal organization in V1. Firstly, from the analysis of multi-electrode recording data in V1, we found that the ON-OFF subregion distance of receptive fields varies periodically across the cortical surface, strongly correlated to ocular dominance and spatial frequency in the area. Further, the ON-OFF alignment angle, that is orthogonal to the ON-OFF distance, appears to correlate with orientation tuning. These suggest that the orthogonal organization in V1 may originate from the spatial organization of the ON-OFF receptive fields in the bottom-up projections, and this scenario was tested from analysis of the RGC mosaics data in monkeys and cats. We found that the ON-OFF RGC distance and ON-OFF angle of neighbouring RGCs are organized into a topographic tiling across mosaics, analogous to the orthogonal intersection of cortical tuning maps. These findings suggest that the regularly structured ON-OFF patterns mirrored from a retina may initiate efficient tiling of functional domains in V1.HighlightsOrthogonal organization of visual tuning maps are observed in both V1 and the retinaCortical tuning maps are correlated with the profile of ON-OFF feedforward projectionsThe profile of ON-OFF receptive fields varies periodically across the V1 surfaceRegularly structured RGC patterns initiate the orthogonal tiling of sensory modules in V1


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre R. Falet ◽  
Jonathan Côté ◽  
Veronica Tarka ◽  
Zaida-Escila Martinez-Moreno ◽  
Patrice Voss ◽  
...  

AbstractWe present a novel method to map the functional organization of the human auditory cortex noninvasively using magnetoencephalography (MEG). More specifically, this method estimates via reverse correlation the spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRF) in response to a dense pure tone stimulus, from which important spectrotemporal characteristics of neuronal processing can be extracted and mapped back onto the cortex surface. We show that several neuronal populations can be found examining the spectrotemporal characteristics of their STRFs, and demonstrate how these can be used to generate tonotopic gradient maps. In doing so, we show that the spatial resolution of MEG is sufficient to reliably extract important information about the spatial organization of the auditory cortex, while enabling the analysis of complex temporal dynamics of auditory processing such as best temporal modulation rate and response latency given its excellent temporal resolution. Furthermore, because spectrotemporally dense auditory stimuli can be used with MEG, the time required to acquire the necessary data to generate tonotopic maps is significantly less for MEG than for other neuroimaging tools that acquire BOLD-like signals.


2007 ◽  
Vol 98 (3) ◽  
pp. 1194-1212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kota S. Sasaki ◽  
Izumi Ohzawa

The receptive fields of complex cells in the early visual cortex are economically modeled by combining outputs of a quadrature pair of linear filters. For actual complex cells, such a minimal model may be insufficient because many more simple cells are thought to make up a complex cell receptive field. To examine the minimalist model physiologically, we analyzed spatial relationships between the internal structure (subunits) and the overall receptive fields of individual complex cells by a two-stimulus interaction technique. The receptive fields of complex cells are more circular and only slightly larger than their subunits in size. In addition, complex cell subunits occupy spatial extents similar to those of simple cell receptive fields. Therefore in these respects, the minimalist schema is a fair approximation to actual complex cells. However, there are violations against the minimal model. Simple cell receptive fields have significantly fewer subregions than complex cell subunits and, in general, simple cell receptive fields are elongated more horizontally than vertically. This bias is absent in complex cell subunits and receptive fields. Thus simple cells cannot be equated to individual complex cell subunits and spatial pooling of simple cells may occur anisotropically to constitute a complex cell subunit. Moreover, when linear filters for complex cell subunits are examined separately for bright and dark responses, there are significant imbalances and position displacements between them. This suggests that actual complex cell receptive fields are constructed by a richer combination of linear filters than proposed by the minimalist model.


1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. P. Sabatini ◽  
G. M. Bisio ◽  
L. Raffo

The spatial organization of cortical axon and dendritic fields could be an interesting structural paradigm to obtain a functional specificity with out postulating highly specific feedforward connections. In this article, we investigate the functional implications of recurrent intracortical inhibition when it occurs through clustered medium-range interconnection schemes (Wörgötter & Koch, 1991; Somogyi, 1989; Kritzer, Cowey, & Somogyi, 1992). Moreover, the interaction between the inhibitory schemes and visual orientation maps is explored. Assuming linearity, we show that clustered inhibitory mechanisms can trigger a propagation process that allows the development of extra (i.e., induced) interactions among the cortical sites involved in the recurrent loops. In addition, we point out how these interactions functionally modify the response of cortical simple cells and yield to highly structured Gabor-like receptive fields. This study should be considered not as a realistic biological model of the primary visual cortex but as an attempt to explain possible computational principles related to intracortical connectivity and to the underlying single-cell properties.


1988 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 2055-2072 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. I. Simpson ◽  
C. S. Leonard ◽  
R. E. Soodak

1. To compare the spatial organization of the direction selectivity of neurons in the medial terminal nucleus (MTN) of the accessory optic system with that of neurons in the adjacent ventral tegmentum, extracellular single-unit recordings were made in the anesthetized rabbit. The ventral tegmental neurons were located in a region called the visual tegmental relay zone (VTRZ), which is defined by the ventral tegmental terminal field of contralaterally projecting MTN neurons. 2. Some of the present sample of MTN neurons (5 of 34) had monocular receptive fields composed of two parts distinguished by a marked difference in the orientation of their respective direction-selective tuning curves. For one part of the receptive field the preferred excitatory direction was "up," while for the other part it was "down." Such receptive fields for one eye were called bipartite, whereas the more usually encountered MTN receptive fields, which could be characterized by a single direction-selective tuning curve, were called uniform. 3. Of the 16 neurons recorded from the VTRZ, all but one were binocular. For these neurons, both uniform and bipartite receptive fields were found for each eye alone. The only monocular neuron encountered in the VTRZ had a contralateral, bipartite receptive field. 4. The spatial organization of the direction selectivity of bipartite receptive fields strongly suggests that they are suited to represent rotation of the visual field about a horizontal axis located in the vertical plane that divides the receptive field into two parts. 5. The boundary between the two parts of the bipartite receptive fields was found using handheld visual stimuli at one of two azimuthal locations, either close to 45 degrees or between 95 and 125 degrees (the 0 degree reference was rostral in the midsagittal plane). This particular structure of the bipartite receptive fields suggests that their preferred rotation axes have a close spatial relation to the best-response axes of the semicircular canals. 6. Seven VTRZ neurons were antidromically activated by electrical stimulation of the ipsilateral dorsal cap of the inferior olive. Since the receptive fields of VTRZ neurons have many of the structural features characteristic of the receptive fields of rostral dorsal cap neurons we conclude that the spatial organization of the receptive fields of dorsal cap neurons is, for the most part, synthesized prior to the inferior olive.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


Neuroscience ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 193 ◽  
pp. 429-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.V. Portfors ◽  
Z.M. Mayko ◽  
K. Jonson ◽  
G.F. Cha ◽  
P.D. Roberts

2015 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 2390-2403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyse Piché ◽  
Sébastien Thomas ◽  
Christian Casanova

The pulvinar is the largest extrageniculate thalamic visual nucleus in mammals. It establishes reciprocal connections with virtually all visual cortexes and likely plays a role in transthalamic cortico-cortical communication. In cats, the lateral posterior nucleus (LP) of the LP-pulvinar complex can be subdivided in two subregions, the lateral (LPl) and medial (LPm) parts, which receive a predominant input from the striate cortex and the superior colliculus, respectively. Here, we revisit the receptive field structure of LPl and LPm cells in anesthetized cats by determining their first-order spatiotemporal profiles through reverse correlation analysis following sparse noise stimulation. Our data reveal the existence of previously unidentified receptive field profiles in the LP nucleus both in space and time domains. While some cells responded to only one stimulus polarity, the majority of neurons had receptive fields comprised of bright and dark responsive subfields. For these neurons, dark subfields' size was larger than that of bright subfields. A variety of receptive field spatial organization types were identified, ranging from totally overlapped to segregated bright and dark subfields. In the time domain, a large spectrum of activity overlap was found, from cells with temporally coinciding subfield activity to neurons with distinct, time-dissociated subfield peak activity windows. We also found LP neurons with space-time inseparable receptive fields and neurons with multiple activity periods. Finally, a substantial degree of homology was found between LPl and LPm first-order receptive field spatiotemporal profiles, suggesting a high integration of cortical and subcortical inputs within the LP-pulvinar complex.


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