Spatiotemporal receptive fields of cells in V1 are optimally shaped for stimulus velocity estimation

Abstract

In recent literature, particularly interesting stimulus velocity-selective behaviors were found in the response properties of neurons belonging to the primary visual cortex (V1). In this work, 93 simple and complex cell receptive fields were obtained from the recordings of different experiments made on cats (DeAngelis, Blanche, Touryan) with reverse correlation and the spike-triggered covariance methods and then fitted with a three-dimensional Gabor model, so that cells are seen as minimizers of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle over both space and time. Analysis of the model parameters' cortical distribution suggests that V1 is spatiotemporally organized to maximize the resolution on the stimulus velocity measure.