The relation between V1 neuronal responses and eye movement-like stimulus presentations

Abstract

Primates normally make 2–3 saccadic eye movements/s to explore the environment. To investigate how these eye movements might influence visual responses, we compared the dynamics of stimuli arriving on V1 complex cell receptive fields by switching stimuli in sequence while a monkey fixated to the responses occurring when the stimulus appears due to saccadic eye movements. During the image sequences, information was greater when each image remained on the receptive fields longer, up to 200 ms; information was greatest when there was a gap of 50 ms between images. Responses were more variable when the image appeared due to a saccadic eye movement. The amount of stimulus-related information was lower in the early phase of the post-saccadic time, but increased during the post-saccadic fixation, so that after 400 ms there was almost as much stimulus-related information available as during the image switching. Eye position showed much larger variability after saccades, with the variability decreasing over 350–400ms to reach the level seen during long fixations. The dynamics of information accumulation in V1 complex cells appear to be well matched to the manner in which the environment is normally viewed.