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Texture-dependent motion signals in primate area MT.

Gharaei, S; Tailby, C; Solomon, SS; Solomon, SG; (2013) Texture-dependent motion signals in primate area MT. J Physiol , 591 (22) pp. 5671-5690. 10.1113/jphysiol.2013.257568. Green open access

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Abstract

Neurons in the middle temporal (MT) area of primate cortex provide an important stage in the analysis of visual motion. For simple stimuli such as bars and plaids some neurons in area MT - pattern cells - seem to signal motion independent of contour orientation, but many neurons - component cells - do not. Why area MT supports both types of receptive field is unclear. To address this we made extracellular recordings from single units in area MT of anaesthetised marmoset monkeys and examined responses to two-dimensional images with a large range of orientations and spatial frequencies. Component and pattern cell response remained distinct during presentation of these complex spatial textures. Direction tuning curves were sharpest in component cells when a texture contained a narrow range of orientations, but were similar across all neurons for textures containing all orientations. Response magnitude of pattern cells, but not component cells, increased with the spatial bandwidth of the texture. In addition, response variability in all neurons was reduced when the stimulus was rich in spatial texture. Fisher information analysis showed that component cells provide more informative responses than pattern cells when a texture contains a narrow range of orientations, but pattern cells had more informative responses for broadband textures. Component- and pattern cells may therefore co-exist because they provide complementary and parallel motion signals.

Type: Article
Title: Texture-dependent motion signals in primate area MT.
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1113/jphysiol.2013.257568
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.2013.257568
Additional information: �© 2013 The Authors. The Journal of Physiology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Physiological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Motion, Natural images, Orientation, Visual cortex
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1405373
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