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Two expressions of “surround suppression” in V1 that arise independent of cortical mechanisms of suppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2007

CHRIS TAILBY
Affiliation:
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York
SAMUEL G. SOLOMON
Affiliation:
Department of Physiology, The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
JONATHAN W. PEIRCE
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham UK
ANDREW B. METHA
Affiliation:
Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, Australia

Abstract

The preferred stimulus size of a V1 neuron decreases with increases in stimulus contrast. It has been supposed that stimulus contrast is the primary determinant of such spatial summation in V1 cells, though the extent to which it depends on other stimulus attributes such as orientation and spatial frequency remains untested. We investigated this by recording from single cells in V1 of anaesthetized cats and monkeys, measuring size-tuning curves for high-contrast drifting gratings of optimal spatial configuration, and comparing these curves with those obtained at lower contrast or at sub-optimal orientations or spatial frequencies. For drifting gratings of optimal spatial configuration, lower contrasts produced less surround suppression resulting in increases in preferred size. High contrast gratings of sub-optimal spatial configuration produced more surround suppression than optimal low-contrast gratings, and as much or more surround suppression than optimal high-contrast gratings. For sub-optimal spatial frequencies, preferred size was similar to that for the optimal high-contrast stimulus, whereas for sub-optimal orientations, preferred size was smaller than that for the optimal high-contrast stimulus. These results indicate that, while contrast is an important determinant of spatial summation in V1, it is not the only determinant. Simulation of these experiments on a cortical receptive field modeled as a Gabor revealed that the small preferred sizes observed for non-preferred stimuli could result simply from linear filtering by the classical receptive field. Further simulations show that surround suppression in retinal ganglion cells and LGN cells can be propagated to neurons in V1, though certain properties of the surround seen in cortex indicate that it is not solely inherited from earlier stages of processing.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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