The computational rules of cross-modality suppression in the visual posterior sylvian area

Abstract

The macaque visual posterior sylvian area (VPS) is an area with neurons responding selectively to heading direction in both visual and vestibular modalities, but how VPS neurons combined these two sensory signals is still unknown. In contrast to the subadditive characteristics in the medial superior temporal area (MSTd), responses in VPS were dominated by vestibular signals, with approximately a winner-take-all competition. The conditional Fisher information analysis shows that VPS neural population encodes information from distinct sensory modalities under large and small offset conditions, which differs from MSTd whose neural population contains more information about visual stimuli in both conditions. However, the combined responses of single neurons in both areas can be well fit by weighted linear sums of unimodal responses. Furthermore, a normalization model captured most vestibular and visual interaction characteristics for both VPS and MSTd, indicating the divisive normalization mechanism widely exists in the cortex.