The attentional modualation of receptive field structures and other sensory properties of area mst of macaque visual cortex

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the first funding period we were able to demonstrate a dissociation between sensory pref-erences and attentional modulation in an area of primate visual cortex, by showing for the first time that feature-based attentional modulation does not affect all stimulus parameters a cell in extrastriate cortex (here area MST) is tuned for. This asymmetry between selectivities is complemented by a difference in the behavioural relevance of selectivities that are atten-tionally modulated and those that are not. We consider this evidence that the (not attentional-ly modulated) linear motion selectivity observed in MST is not inherited from area MT but is generated de novo in MST as part of the computation performed in MST to generate the complex spiral motion selectivity in MST. Additionally, our reverse-correlation analysis of MST receptive fields showed complex spatial distributions of direction and speed prefer-ences that would not show up in traditional receptive field mapping approaches.These observations directly lead to our central objective for a second funding period, namely to investigate the interaction of spatial attention with MST receptive field profiles, adapting the reverse-correlation approach developed in the first funding period. This attentional map-ping is flanked by two smaller objectives: Completing our characterization of the linear and nonlinear sensory receptive field characteristics of MSTd neurons (sensory mapping) and a pilot study to investigate the possibility of inhibiting the top-down modulation of MST recep-tive fields from the Frontal Eye Field (FEF), using optogenetic approaches (optogenetic pilot study).Our aim for the end of the second funding period is to have substantially advanced, not only our knowledge of (linear and non-linear) sensory properties of MSTd neurons, but also of how various forms of (top-down, spatial, object-based) attention reshape MSTd selectivity, mediated by inter-areal communication with the FEF.