Submitted on July 12, 2006
Accepted on January 15, 2007
Speed dependence of tuning to one-dimensional features in V1
Ferenc Mechler1*, Ifije E Ohiorhenuan2, and Jonathan D Victor2
1 Neurology and Neuroscience, Medical College of Cornell University, New York, New York, United States
2 Neurology and Neuroscience, Medical College of Cornell University, United States
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fmechler{at}med.cornell.edu.
Using drifting compound grating stimuli matched in energy and frequency spectrum, we previously showed (Mechler et al. 2002) that neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) were tuned to line-like, edge-like, and intermediate one-dimensional features. Because these compound grating stimuli were drifting, allowing for potential interaction between shape and motion, we examine here the dependence of V1 feature tuning on drift speed. We find that the feature selectivity and specificity of individual V1 neurons strongly depend on speed. A simple model explains these observations in terms of an interaction between linear filtering by the receptive field and the static nonlinearity of spike threshold, embedded in a recurrent network. While the speed-dependent behaviors in single V1 neurons preclude their acting as extractors of one-dimensional features, the population as a whole retains a representation of a full suite of features.
