Chang Kelly, Fine Ione, Boynton Geoffrey M
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
J Vis. 2025 Jan 2;25(1):5. doi: 10.1167/jov.25.1.5.
The population receptive field (pRF) method, which measures the region in visual space that elicits a blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in a voxel in retinotopic cortex, is a powerful tool for investigating the functional organization of human visual cortex with fMRI (Dumoulin & Wandell, 2008). However, recent work has shown that pRF estimates for early retinotopic visual areas can be biased and unreliable, especially for voxels representing the fovea. Here, we show that a log-bar stimulus that is logarithmically warped along the eccentricity dimension produces more reliable estimates of pRF size and location than the traditional moving bar stimulus. The log-bar stimulus was better able to identify pRFs near the foveal representation, and pRFs were smaller in size, consistent with simulation estimates of receptive field sizes in the fovea.
群体感受野（pRF）方法通过测量在视网膜拓扑皮层的体素中引发血氧水平依赖（BOLD）信号的视觉空间区域，是利用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究人类视觉皮层功能组织的有力工具（Dumoulin & Wandell，2008）。然而，最近的研究表明，早期视网膜拓扑视觉区域的pRF估计可能存在偏差且不可靠，尤其是对于代表中央凹的体素。在这里，我们表明，沿离心率维度进行对数扭曲的对数条形刺激比传统的移动条形刺激能产生更可靠的pRF大小和位置估计。对数条形刺激能更好地识别中央凹表征附近的pRF，且pRF尺寸更小，这与中央凹感受野大小的模拟估计一致。
