Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2010 Dec;13(12):1542-8. doi: 10.1038/nn.2676. Epub 2010 Nov 14.
Visual area V4 in the macaque monkey is a cortical area that is strongly involved in color and shape perception. However, fundamental questions about V4 are still debated. V4 was initially characterized as a color-processing area, but subsequent studies revealed that it contains a diverse complement of cells, including those with preference for color, orientation, disparity and higher-order feature preferences. This has led to disputes and uncertainty about the role of V4 in vision. Using intrinsic signal optical imaging methods in awake, behaving monkeys, we found that different feature preferences are functionally organized in V4. Optical images revealed that regions with preferential response to color were largely separate from orientation-selective regions. Our results help to resolve long-standing controversies regarding functional diversity and retinotopy in V4 and indicate the presence of spatially biased distribution of featural representation in V4 in the ventral visual pathway.
在猕猴中,视区 V4 是一个与颜色和形状感知密切相关的皮质区域。然而,关于 V4 的一些基本问题仍存在争议。V4 最初被描述为一个处理颜色的区域,但随后的研究表明,它包含了多种细胞类型,包括对颜色、方向、视差和更高阶特征有偏好的细胞。这导致了关于 V4 在视觉中的作用的争议和不确定性。我们使用在清醒、行为的猴子中进行的内源信号光学成像方法,发现不同的特征偏好在 V4 中是有功能组织的。光学图像显示,对颜色有优先反应的区域与方向选择性区域基本分离。我们的结果有助于解决关于 V4 中功能多样性和视网膜投射的长期争议,并表明在腹侧视觉通路上存在特征表示的空间偏向分布。