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Are the preferred directions of neurons in cat extrastriate cortex related to optic flow?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2009

Helen Sherk ,
Jong-Nam Kim  and
Kathleen Mulligan
Helen Sherk
Affiliation:
Department of Biological structure, University of Washington, Seattle
Jong-Nam Kim
Affiliation:
Department of Biological structure, University of Washington, Seattle
Kathleen Mulligan
Affiliation:
Department of Biological structure, University of Washington, Seattle
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Abstract

It has been proposed that one area of extrastriate cortex in the cat, the lateral suprasylvian area (LS), plays an important role in visual analysis during locomotion (Rauschecker et al., 1987). Cells in LS reportedly tend to prefer directions along a trajectory originating at the center of gaze, and passing outward through the receptive-field center. Such directions coincide with the directions of image motion in an optic flow field, the pattern seen by locomoting observers when they fixate the point towards which they are heading (Gibson, 1950). We re-examined this issue for cells in LS with receptive fields in the lower visual field. Cells recorded posterior to Horsley-Clarke A2 showed a clear correlation between preferred direction and receptive-field location, but not that predicted: preferred directions were generally orthogonal to “optic flow” directions. Since these cells were all located posterior to those in studies showing a bias for “optic flow” directions, we hypothesized that there are two cell populations within LS, an anterior population that tends to prefer radial-outward directions, and a posterior population that tends to prefer directions orthogonal to radial. Data from earlier mapping experiments (Sherk & Mulligan, 1993) supported this idea.

Keywords

Optic flowLateral suprasylvian cortexExtrastriate cortexPreferred directionDirection-selective cells
Type
Research Articles
Information
Visual Neuroscience , Volume 12 , Issue 5 , September 1995 , pp. 887 - 894
Copyright
copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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