Visual impairment by surrounding noise is due to interactions among stimuli in the higher-order visual cortex

Abstract

Observers have difficulty identifying a target in their peripheral vision in the presence of surrounding stimuli. Although hypotheses addressing this phenomenon have been proposed, such as the integration of stimuli and surround suppression in the higher-order visual cortex, no direct comparisons of the psychophysical and neuronal sensitivities have been performed. Here we measured the performance of monkeys with a variant of the direction discrimination task using a center/surround bipartite random-dot stimulus while simultaneously recording from isolated neurons from the middle temporal visual area (MT). The psychophysical threshold increased with the addition of a task-irrelevant noise annulus that surrounded the task-relevant motion stimuli. The neuronal threshold of MT neurons also increased at a spatial scale similar to the psychophysical threshold. This suggests that the impaired ability in our task resulted from impairment in the MT area. Importantly, reduced neuronal performance was due to both a reduced response to preferred motion and an enhanced response to nonpreferred motion. These observations suggest that impairment caused by surrounding noise results from interactions between stimuli and noise and not from a reduction in the response of visual neurons.