Retinotopic Space Research Articles

Different spatial organizations of saccade related BOLD-activation in parietal and striate cortex

Voluntary saccades performed in total darkness provide the opportunity to investigate the brain system active during saccades without confounding effects caused by the saccade induced shifts of the retinal image. Using this approach saccade related activation has been demonstrated not only in parietal but also in striate cortex. Currently no information is available about the reference frame in which this activation is represented in parietal and in striate cortex. However, knowledge about how the brain codes spatial information about saccades in the absence of visual input is potentially relevant to our understanding of visually guided behaviour. The present study combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with simultaneous electrooculogram-recordings to provide evidence that volitional saccades executed in total darkness are represented in a retinotopic reference frame in a parietal brain area, the putative homologue of human LIP, and in a head/body centred egocentric reference frame in human V1. The potential co-existence of retinotopic and egocentric space representations in the primary visual cortex indicates that V1 may be involved in visuo-motor integration.

Responses to direction and transparent motion stimuli in area FST of the macaque

Motion transparency occurs when multiple object velocities are present within a local region of retinotopic space. Transparent signals can carry information useful in the segmentation of moving objects and in the extraction of three-dimensional structure from relative motion cues. However, the physiological substrate underlying the detection of motion transparency is poorly understood. Direction tuned neurons in area MT are suppressed by transparent stimuli, suggesting that other motion sensitive areas may be needed to represent this signal robustly. Recent neuroimaging evidence implicated two such areas in the macaque superior temporal sulcus. We studied one of these, FST, with electrophysiological methods and found that a large fraction of the neurons responded well to two opposite directions of motion and to transparent stimuli containing those same directions. A linear combination of MT-like responses qualitatively reproduces this behavior and predicts that FST neurons can be tuned for transparent motion containing specific direction and depth components. We suggest that FST plays a role in motion segmentation based on transparent signals.

An object-based frame of reference within the human pulvinar

The pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus is massively interconnected to cortical areas which translate spatial visual information into coordinate systems defined by multiple reference frames [Grieve et al. (The primate pulvinar nuclei: vision and action. Trends in Neurosciences 2000; 23(1): 35-39)]. Here we report the first evidence that spatial coding in the pulvinar is defined by an object-based frame. We evaluated the efficiency of spatial coding in two patients with damage to spatial maps within the pulvinar. Patients located targets within a 2 x 2 (up/down x left/right) search array, which was itself located within a 2 x 2 retinotopic space. For both patients, spatial deficits were defined in both a retinotopic and an object-based frame. For example, targets in the contralesional side of the array were poorly localized whether the array appeared in contra or ipsilesional retinotopic space. We conclude that spatial processing bias following pulvinar damage can be defined by coordinate systems based on both object-based and retinotopic spaces.

Feature Fusion Reveals Slow and Fast Visual Memories

Although the visual system can achieve a coarse classification of its inputs in a relatively short time, the synthesis of qualia-rich and detailed percepts can take substantially more time. If these prolonged computations were to take place in a retinotopic space, moving objects would generate extensive smear. However, under normal viewing conditions, moving objects appear relatively sharp and clear, suggesting that a substantial part of visual short-term memory takes place at a nonretinotopic locus. By using a retinotopic feature fusion and a nonretinotopic feature attribution paradigm, we provide evidence for a relatively fast retinotopic buffer and a substantially slower nonretinotopic memory. We present a simple model that can account for the dynamics of these complementary memory processes. Taken together, our results indicate that the visual system can accomplish temporal integration of information while avoiding smear by breaking off sensory memory into fast and slow components that are implemented in retinotopic and nonretinotopic loci, respectively.

Contribution of lateral interactions in V1 to organization of response properties

We propose a model of self-organization of synaptic connections in V1, emphasizing lateral interactions. Subject to Hebbian learning with decay, evolution of synaptic strengths proceeds to a stable state in which all synapses are either saturated, or have minimum pre/post-synaptic coincidence. The most stable configuration gives rise to anatomically realistic “local maps”, each of macro-columnar size, and each organized as Mobius projections of retinotopic space. A tiling of V1, constructed of approximately mirror-image reflections of each local map by its neighbors is formed, accounting for orientation-preference singularities, linear zones, and saddle points—with each map linked by connections between sites of common orientation preference. Ocular dominance columns are partly explained as a special case of the same process. The occurrence of direction preference fractures always in odd numbers around singularities is a specific feature explained by the Mobius configuration of the local map. Effects of stimulus velocity, orientation relative to direction of motion, and extension, upon orientation preference, which are not accounted for by spatial filtering, are explained by interactions between the classic receptive field and global V1.

Center-surround interactions in the middle temporal visual area of the owl monkey.

Microelectrode recording and 2-deoxyglucose (2dg) labeling were used to investigate center-surround interactions in the middle temporal visual area (MT) of the owl monkey. These techniques revealed columnar groups of neurons whose receptive fields had opposite types of center-surround interaction with respect to moving visual stimuli. In one type of column, neurons responded well to objects such as a single bar or spot but poorly to large textured stimuli such as random dots. This was often due to the fact that the receptive fields had antagonistic surrounds: surround motion in the same direction as that preferred by the center suppressed responses, thus rendering these neurons unresponsive to wide-field motion. In the second set of complementary, interdigitated columns, neuronal receptive fields had reinforcing surrounds and responded optimally to wide-field motion. This functional organization could not be accounted for by systematic differences in binocular disparity. Within both column types, neurons whose receptive fields exhibited center-surround interactions were found less frequently in the input layers compared with the other layers. Additional tests were done on single units to examine the nature of the center-surround interactions. The direction tuning of the surround was broader than that of the center, and the preferred direction, with respect to that of the center, tended to be either in the same or opposite direction and only rarely in orthogonal directions. Surround motion at various velocities modulated the overall responsiveness to centrally placed moving stimuli, but it did not produce shifts in the peaks of the center's tuning curves for either direction or speed. In layers 3B and 5 of the local motion processing columns, a number of neurons responded only to local motion contrast but did so over a region of the visual field that was much larger than the optimal stimulus size. The central feature of this receptive field type was the generalization of surround antagonism over retinotopic space-a property similar to other "complex" receptive fields described previously. The columnar organization of different types of center-surround interactions may reflect the initial segregation of visual motion information into wide-field and local motion contrast systems that serve complementary functions in visual motion processing. Such segregation appears to occur at later stages of the macaque motion processing stream, in the medial superior temporal area (MST), and has also been described in invertebrate visual systems where it appears to be involved in the important function of distinguishing background motion from object motion.

Direction-dependent distortions of retinocentric space in the visuomotor transformation for pointing.

The aim of this study was to: (1) quantify errors in open-loop pointing toward a spatially central (but retinally peripheral) visual target with gaze maintained in various eccentric horizontal, vertical, and oblique directions; and (2) determine the computational source of these errors. Eye and arm orientations were measured with the use of search coils while six head-fixed subjects looked and pointed toward remembered targets in complete darkness. On average, subjects made small exaggerations in both the vertical and horizontal components of retinal displacement (tending to overshoot the target relative to current gaze), but individual subjects showed considerable variations in this pattern. Moreover, pointing errors for oblique retinal targets were only partially predictable from errors for the cardinal directions, suggesting that most of these errors did not arise within independent vertical and horizontal coordinate channels. The remaining variance was related to nonhomogeneous, direction-dependent distortions in reading out the magnitudes and directions of retinal displacement. The largest and most consistent nonhomogeneities occurred as discontinuities between adjacent points across the vertical meridian of retinotopic space, perhaps related to the break between the representations of space in the left and right cortices. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that at least some of these visuomotor distortions are due to miscalibrations in quasi-independent visuomotor readout mechanisms for "patches" of retinotopic space, with major discontinuities existing between patches at certain anatomic and/or physiological borders.

Mirror agnosia and mirror ataxia constitute different parietal lobe disorders.

We describe two new clinical syndromes, mirror agnosia and mirror ataxia, both characterized by the deficit of reaching for an object through a mirror in association with a lesion of either parietal lobe. Clinical investigation of 13 patients demonstrated that the impairments affected both sides of the body. In mirror agnosia, the patients always reached toward the virtual object in the mirror and they were not capable of changing their behavior even after presentation of the position of the object in real visual space. In mirror ataxia (resembling optic ataxia) although some patients initially tended to reach for the virtual object in the mirror, they soon learned to guide their arms toward the real object, all of them producing many directional errors. Both patient groups performed poorly on mental rotation, but only the patients with mirror agnosia were impaired in line orientation. Only 1 of the patients suffered from neglect and 3 from apraxia. Magnetic resonance imaging showed that in mirror agnosia the common zone of lesion overlap was scattered around the posterior angular gyrus/superior temporal gyrus and in mirror ataxia around the postcentral sulcus. We propose that both these clinical syndromes may represent different types of dissociation of retinotopic space and body scheme, or likewise, of allocentric and egocentric space normally adjusted in the parietal lobe.