Spatial Receptive Fields Research Articles

Responses of single units in the monkey superior colliculus to moving stimuli.

1. Single unit responses of pan-directional cells to moving and stationary flashing stimuli were studied in the superficial layers of the superior colliculus in paralysed, anaesthetized rhesus monkeys. The aim of this study was to see how far cell responses to moving stimuli fit in with what would be expected from their responses to stationary flashing stimuli. 2. Both the leading and the trailing edge of a moving stimulus evoke a transient response. If the diameter of moving light spots is increased the strength of the leading edge response increases, reaches a maximum and decreases to a constant value which is similar to the behaviour of the on response when the diameter of flashing spots is increased. The strength of the trailing edge response increases and reaches the same strength as that of the leading edge response. If the width of a long moving slit is increased, the strength of the leading edge response is the same at all slit widths, while the strength of the trailing edge response shows a course similar to that of the trailing edge response if the spot diameter is increased. If the length of a wide moving slit is increased both the leading and the trailing edge responses decrease. These results indicate that the strength of both leading and trailing edge responses is dependent on the degree the inhibitory surround is activated. 3. The leading and the trailing edge of a stimulus evoke their responses at the same position in the receptive field independent of the direction of movement. 4. Increasing the velocity of a moving stimulus shows that in general the leading edge response is present up to higher velocities than the trailing edge response independent of the sign of contrast. The burst duration to moving stimuli decreases with increasing stimulus velocity and appears to be determined by the time a moving edge is present in the receptive field centre. When this time becomes shorter than 10--20 ms, the burst duration for moving stimuli is constant and about the same as for flashing stimuli. This indicates that, although spatial receptive field properties can vary considerably, temporal receptive field properties show a strong similarity among different units. 5. The response latencies to light and dark moving edges are the same, which in turn are about equal to the response latencies to stationary flashing stimuli. 6. Stimulation experiments show that the general response characteristics to moving stimuli can be predicted by using a set of receptive field parameters derived from responses to stationary flashing stimuli. The most important variable of moving stimuli appears to be the period of time a moving contour is present within the receptive field centre, besides the degree of activation of the inhibitory surround.

Space domain properties of a spatial frequency channel in human vision

Many properties of contrast detection in human vision may be described with reference to a set of tuned spatial frequency channels. The spatial sensitivity of the channel with optimal sensitivity at 3.0 c/deg was studied by measuring threshold as a function of the width of truncated 3.0 c/deg sine-wave gratings that ranged from 2.3′ to 4.6°. Three strategies were used to isolate the threshold response of the channel: (1) The channel at 3.0 c/deg was chosen because of its position at the peak of the contrast sensitivity function. (2) A discrimination paradigm was used in which test stimuli were superimposed on a low contrast grating which was shown to selectively facilitate their detection. (3) The detecting channel was more sensitive to the sine-wave configuration of the test stimuli than to more conventional spatial summation stimuli, such as rectangular bars. Results of the main experiment showed that threshold contrasts for the truncated sine-wave stimuli declined in two stages. From 2.3′ to 40′, the threshold decline was steep, with a plateau at 10′. From 40′ to 4.6°, threshold declined as a power function of stimulus width with an exponent of −0.35. The data of the main experiment were used to derive the spatial receptive field sensitivity for the channel at 3.0 c/deg. The data were accounted for by spatial summation within a receptive field, and probability summation in space across receptive fields.

Effects of behavioral performance on single-unit firing patterns in inferior colliculus of the rhesus monkey

ArticlesEffects of behavioral performance on single-unit firing patterns in inferior colliculus of the rhesus monkeyA. Ryan, and J. MillerA. Ryan, and J. MillerPublished Online:01 Jul 1977https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.1977.40.4.943MoreSectionsPDF (2 MB)Download PDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesGet permissionsTrack citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInWeChat Previous Back to Top Next Download PDF FiguresReferencesRelatedInformation Cited ByForeground stimuli and task engagement enhance neuronal adaptation to background noise in the inferior colliculus of macaquesFrancesca Rocchi and Ramnarayan Ramachandran28 October 2020 | Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 124, No. 5Incorporating behavioral and sensory context into spectro-temporal models of auditory encodingHearing Research, Vol. 360Auditory Selective Attention Modulates Activation of Human Inferior ColliculusTeemu Rinne, Marja H. Balk, Sonja Koistinen, Taina Autti, Kimmo Alho, and Mikko Sams1 December 2008 | Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 100, No. 6Representation of Eye Position in Primate Inferior ColliculusKristin Kelly Porter, Ryan R. Metzger, and Jennifer M. Groh1 March 2006 | Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 95, No. 3A Monotonic Code for Sound Azimuth in Primate Inferior ColliculusJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 15, No. 8Eye Position Influences Auditory Responses in Primate Inferior ColliculusNeuron, Vol. 29, No. 2Audition and the auditory pathway of a vocal new world primate, the common marmosetProgress in Neurobiology, Vol. 41, No. 3The effects of GABAergic inhibition on monaural response properties of neurons in the mustache bat's inferior colliculusHearing Research, Vol. 65, No. 1-2The descending auditory pathway and acousticomotor systems: connections with the inferior colliculusBrain Research Reviews, Vol. 15, No. 3Single unit activity in the auditory cortex and the medial geniculate body of the rhesus monkey: Behavioral modulationBrain Research, Vol. 324, No. 2Neural substrates for tone-conditioned bradycardia demonstrated with 2-deoxyglucose. I. Activation of auditory nucleiBehavioural Brain Research, Vol. 14, No. 3Classical conditioning enhances auditory 2-deoxyglucose patterns in the inferior colliculusNeuroscience Letters, Vol. 51, No. 1Properties of spatial receptive fields in the central nucleus of the cat inferior colliculus. I. Responses to tones of low intensityHearing Research, Vol. 13, No. 2Functional analysis of attention-related unit activity in the reticular formation of the monkeyExperimental Neurology, Vol. 77, No. 3The response of single units in the auditory cortex of rhesus monkeys to predicted and to unpredicted sound stimuliBrain Research, Vol. 230, No. 1-2Increasing intensities of wide band noise increase [14C]2-deoxyglucose uptake in gerbil central auditory structuresBrain Research, Vol. 230, No. 1-2 More from this issue > Volume 40Issue 4July 1977Pages 943-956 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 1977 the American Physiological Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1152/jn.1977.40.4.943PubMed407335History Published online 1 July 1977 Published in print 1 July 1977 Metrics

Some neural mechanisms in the inferior colliculus of the cat which may be relevant to localization of a sound source.

Some neural mechanisms in the inferior colliculus of the cat which may be relevant to localization of a sound source.

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The responses of simple cells in primary visual cortex to sinusoidal gratings can primarily be predicted from their spatial receptive fields, as mapped using spots or bars. Although this quasilinearity is well documented, it is not clear whether it holds for complex natural stimuli. We recorded from simple cells in the primary visual cortex of anesthetized ferrets while stimulating with flashed digitized photographs of natural scenes. We applied standard reverse-correlation methods to quantify the average natural stimulus that invokes a neuronal response. Although these maps cannot be the receptive fields, we find that they still predict the preferred orientation of grating for each cell very well (<i>r</i> = 0.91); they do not predict the spatial-frequency tuning. Using a novel application of the linear reconstruction method called regularized pseudoinverse, we were able to recover high-resolution receptive-field maps from the responses to a relatively small number of natural scenes. These receptive-field maps not only predict the optimum orientation of each cell (<i>r</i> = 0.96) but also the spatial-frequency optimum (<i>r</i> = 0.89); the maps also predict the tuning bandwidths of many cells. Therefore, our first conclusion is that the tuning preferences of the cells are primarily linear and constant across stimulus type. However, when we used these maps to predict the actual responses of the cells to natural scenes, we did find evidence of expansive output nonlinearity and nonlinear influences from outside the classical receptive fields, orientation tuning, and spatial-frequency tuning.