Ohtsuka H, Tanaka Y, Kusunoki M, Sakata H
Department of Ophthalmology, Nihon University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan.
Nippon Ganka Gakkai Zasshi. 1995 Jan;99(1):59-67.
Patients with parietal lesions may fail to adjust the orientation of the hand to that of the target object or may make errors in judging the orientation of the bar. This suggests that the parietal cortex functions to discriminate the orientation of objects. Therefore, we studied orientation selectivity of the visual neurons of the posterior parietal association cortex of alert behaving monkeys. We recorded 23 neurons that showed selectivity in the axis orientation of visual stimulus in the lateral bank and fundus of the caudal part of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Almost all the neurons tested with a slit on the screen responded better to a longer or narrower stimulus. There were also neurons which responded only to three dimensional objects, such as a bar presented in the sagittal orientation tilted forward or backward. The majority of these neurons had wide receptive fields and their responses were position-invariant. These results suggest that the axis orientation selective neurons of the parietal cortex represent orientation of the longitudinal axis of objects in 3-dimensional space.
顶叶病变患者可能无法将手的方向调整到目标物体的方向，或者在判断杆的方向时可能会出错。这表明顶叶皮层的功能是辨别物体的方向。因此，我们研究了警觉行为猴子后顶叶联合皮层视觉神经元的方向选择性。我们记录了23个在内侧顶叶沟（IPS）尾部外侧壁和底部对视觉刺激的轴方向表现出选择性的神经元。几乎所有用屏幕上的狭缝测试的神经元对更长或更窄的刺激反应更好。也有一些神经元只对三维物体有反应，比如以矢状方向向前或向后倾斜的杆。这些神经元中的大多数具有广泛的感受野，并且它们的反应是位置不变的。这些结果表明，顶叶皮层的轴方向选择性神经元代表三维空间中物体纵轴的方向。
