Dynamics of Receptive Field Size in Primary Visual Cortex

Recent studies have shown that the initial responses evoked by a stimulus in neurons of primary visual cortex are dominated by low spatial frequency information in the image, whereas finer spatial scales dominate later in the response. Such phenomena could arise from the dynamics of receptive field (RF) size at early stages of cortical processing. We measured changes in RF size in simple cells recorded from the primary visual cortex of anesthetized macaques by measuring their first-order spatio-temporal kernels and fitting them with two-dimensional Gabor functions at different time slices. We found that the width and length of the RF envelope and the period of the carrier tend to decrease during the time-course of the response. The most pronounced changes are seen in the width and spatial period of the RFs, which decrease by 15% during the central 20 ms of the response. These results show a novel form of spatio-temporal inseparability in simple cells and are consistent with the notion of a coarse-to-fine processing of information in early visual cortex.