Song Chen, Schwarzkopf Dietrich Samuel, Kanai Ryota, Rees Geraint
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK; Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK; Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK.
Neuron. 2015 Feb 4;85(3):641-56. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.041. Epub 2015 Jan 22.
The anatomy of cerebral cortex is characterized by two genetically independent variables, cortical thickness and cortical surface area, that jointly determine cortical volume. It remains unclear how cortical anatomy might influence neural response properties and whether such influences would have behavioral consequences. Here, we report that thickness and surface area of human early visual cortices exert opposite influences on neural population tuning with behavioral consequences for perceptual acuity. We found that visual cortical thickness correlated negatively with the sharpness of neural population tuning and the accuracy of perceptual discrimination at different visual field positions. In contrast, visual cortical surface area correlated positively with neural population tuning sharpness and perceptual discrimination accuracy. Our findings reveal a central role for neural population tuning in linking visual cortical anatomy to visual perception and suggest that a perceptually advantageous visual cortex is a thinned one with an enlarged surface area.
大脑皮层的解剖结构由两个基因独立的变量——皮层厚度和皮层表面积决定，这两个变量共同决定了皮层体积。目前尚不清楚皮层解剖结构如何影响神经反应特性，以及这种影响是否会产生行为后果。在此，我们报告人类早期视觉皮层的厚度和表面积对神经群体调谐产生相反的影响，并对视觉敏锐度产生行为后果。我们发现，视觉皮层厚度与不同视野位置的神经群体调谐锐度以及知觉辨别准确性呈负相关。相反，视觉皮层表面积与神经群体调谐锐度和知觉辨别准确性呈正相关。我们的研究结果揭示了神经群体调谐在将视觉皮层解剖结构与视觉感知联系起来方面的核心作用，并表明在感知上具有优势的视觉皮层是一个变薄且表面积增大的皮层。
