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J Neurophysiol (December 10, 2008). doi:10.1152/jn.90993.2008
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Submitted on August 28, 2008
Revised on November 26, 2008
Accepted on December 3, 2008

Close similarity between spatio-temporal frequency tunings of human cortical responses and involuntary manual following responses to visual motion

Kaoru Amano1*, Toshitaka Kimura2, Shin'ya Nishida3, Tsunehiro Takeda, and Hiroaki Gomi2

1 The university of Tokyo
2 NTT Communication Sci Labs
3 NTT Communication Science Labs

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: amano{at}brain.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

Human brain uses visual motion inputs not only for generating subjective sensation of motion, but also for directly guiding involuntary actions. For instance, during arm reaching, a large-field visual motion is quickly and involuntarily transformed into a manual response in the direction of visual motion (manual following response, MFR). Previous attempts to correlate motion-evoked cortical activities, revealed by brain imaging techniques, with conscious motion perception have resulted only in partial success. In contrast, here we show a surprising degree of similarity between the MFR and the population neural activity measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG). We measured the MFR and MEG induced by the same motion onset of a large-field sinusoidal drifting grating, with changing the spatio-temporal frequency of the grating. The initial transient phase of these two responses had very similar spatio-temporal tunings. Specifically, both the MEG and MFR amplitudes increased as the spatial frequency was decreased to, at most, 0.05 c/deg, or as the temporal frequency was increased to, at least, 10 Hz. We also found in peak latency a quantitative agreement (~100-150 ms) and correlated changes against spatio-temporal frequency changes between MEG and MFR. In comparison with these two responses, conscious visual motion detection is known to be most sensitive (i.e., have the lowest detection threshold) at higher spatial frequencies and have longer and more variable response latencies. Our results suggest a close relationship between the properties of involuntary motor responses and motion-evoked cortical activity as reflected by the MEG.







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