HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: 97/1/407    most recent 00830.2006v1 Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via ISI Web of Science (3) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Malone, B. J. Articles by Ringach, D. L. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Malone, B. J. Articles by Ringach, D. L.

Dynamics of Receptive Field Size in Primary Visual Cortex

¹Department of Neurobiology, David Geffen School of Medicine, and ²Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, California and ³School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Submitted 8 August 2006; accepted in final form 2 October 2006

Recent studies have shown that the initial responses evoked by a stimulus in neurons of primary visual cortex are dominated by low spatial frequency information in the image, whereas finer spatial scales dominate later in the response. Such phenomena could arise from the dynamics of receptive field (RF) size at early stages of cortical processing. We measured changes in RF size in simple cells recorded from the primary visual cortex of anesthetized macaques by measuring their first-order spatio-temporal kernels and fitting them with two-dimensional Gabor functions at different time slices. We found that the width and length of the RF envelope and the period of the carrier tend to decrease during the time-course of the response. The most pronounced changes are seen in the width and spatial period of the RFs, which decrease by 15% during the central 20 ms of the response. These results show a novel form of spatio-temporal inseparability in simple cells and are consistent with the notion of a coarse-to-fine processing of information in early visual cortex.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. Sadagopan and X. Wang Level Invariant Representation of Sounds by Populations of Neurons in Primary Auditory Cortex J. Neurosci., March 26, 2008; 28(13): 3415 - 3426. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]