2134/36549
Ambarish S. Pawar
Ambarish S.
Pawar
Sergei Gepshtein
Sergei
Gepshtein
Sergey Saveliev
Sergey
Saveliev
Thomas D Albright
Thomas D
Albright
Mechanisms of spatiotemporal selectivity in cortical area MT
Loughborough University
2019
untagged
Physical Sciences not elsewhere classified
2019-01-11 14:59:33
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Mechanisms_of_spatiotemporal_selectivity_in_cortical_area_MT/9412949
Cortical sensory neurons are characterized by selectivity to stimulation. This selectivity was
originally viewed as a part of the fundamental “receptive field” characteristic of neurons. This view
was later challenged by evidence that receptive fields are modulated by stimuli outside of the
classical receptive field. Here we show that even this modified view of selectivity needs revision.
We measured spatial frequency selectivity of neurons in cortical area MT of alert monkeys and
found that their selectivity strongly depends on luminance contrast, shifting to higher spatial
frequencies as contrast increases. The changes of preferred spatial frequency are large at low
temporal frequency and they decrease monotonically as temporal frequency increases. That is,
even interactions among basic stimulus dimensions of luminance contrast, spatial frequency and
temporal frequency strongly influence neuronal selectivity. This dynamic nature of neuronal
selectivity is inconsistent with the notion of stimulus preference as a stable characteristic of
cortical neurons.