The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, 5290002 Ramat Gan, Israel.
Cereb Cortex. 2017 Nov 1;27(11):5261-5273. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhw305.
During contour integration, neuronal populations in the primary visual cortex (V1) enhance their responses to the contour while suppressing their responses to the noisy background. However, the spatial extent and profile of these responses are not fully understood. To investigate this question, 2 monkeys were trained on a contour detection task while we measured population responses in V1 using voltage-sensitive dyes. During stimulus presentation the animals made few fixational saccades, and we used their changing gaze position to image and analyze neuronal responses from large part of the stimulus, encoding multiple contour/background elements. We found that contour enhancement was present over the entire contour-mapped areas. The background suppression increased with distance from the contour, extending into background-mapped areas remotely located from the contour. The spatial profile of enhancement and suppression fitted well with a Gaussian model. These results imply that the divergent cortical responses to contour integration are modulated independently and extend over large areas in V1.
在轮廓整合过程中，初级视觉皮层（V1）中的神经元群体增强了对轮廓的反应，同时抑制了对噪声背景的反应。然而，这些反应的空间范围和特征尚未完全理解。为了研究这个问题，我们在轮廓检测任务中对 2 只猴子进行了训练，同时使用电压敏感染料测量了 V1 中的群体反应。在刺激呈现期间，动物很少进行固视扫视，我们利用它们不断变化的注视位置来成像和分析来自刺激大部分区域的神经元反应，从而对多个轮廓/背景元素进行编码。我们发现，在整个轮廓映射区域都存在轮廓增强。背景抑制随着与轮廓的距离增加而增加，延伸到远离轮廓的背景映射区域。增强和抑制的空间分布与高斯模型拟合良好。这些结果表明，轮廓整合的发散皮层反应是独立调节的，并在 V1 中延伸到很大的区域。
