NEURAL DYNAMICS AND THE PERCEPTION OF VISUAL FORM

当灵长类动物看世界时，它会跳动眼球，并在 在这一运动结束时，眼睛或多或少保持着固定的位置 通常为三分之一秒，于是新的扫视眼球运动 被执行。在每次扫视眼球运动结束时，不同的 不同物体的图像片段被带入接受器 不同神经元组合的区域。视觉场景是 杂乱，许多对象相互重叠和遮挡。这个 感受器中新刺激的出现所引起的活动 神经元场通过松散的皮质层级传播 具有特定时间进程的可视区域。协调的活动 在此间隔期间，不同皮质区域中的许多神经元 据推测，两次扫视之间可能会产生视觉感知。 人们已经了解了许多关于两者之间的联系模式 不同的皮质视觉区域，以及关于 视觉刺激，每个区域的单个神经元对其影响最大 对……敏感。然而，人们对视觉系统是如何处理的知之甚少 对于复杂的刺激，以及对于什么(如果有很多)作用时变 视觉系统中神经元的某些方面可能会发挥作用。这项研究将 通过从单个神经元和成对的 清醒的几个皮质视觉区域(V1、V2、V4和IT)的神经元 猕猴的行为，使用简单和复杂的视觉 刺激，探索神经元对以下两种刺激的反应 闪现或被带入神经元的感受场 眼跳，并量化神经元反应随时间的变化 在这种情况下。这个项目的结果现在应该只有 增加我们对大脑如何工作的基本了解，但也应该 对视觉假体的设计等工作有价值，其中 对神经元编码原理的了解是至关重要的，在 视觉诱发电位的临床解释，它可以 通过对视觉时间进程的更详细的了解来改进 正在处理。

When a primate views the world it makes a saccadic eye movement, and at the end of this movement the eyes remain more-or-less fixed in position for typically a third of a second, whereupon a new saccadic eye movement is performed. At the end of each saccadic eye movement the different pieces of the images of different objects are brought into the receptive fields of different assemblages of neurons. The visual scene is cluttered, with many objects overlapping and occluding each other. The activity elicited by the appearance of new stimuli in the receptive fields of neurons propagates through a loose hierarchy of cortical visual areas with a particular time course. The coordinated activity of many neurons in the different cortical areas during this interval between saccades is presumably what gives rise to visual perception. A great deal has been learned about the pattern of connections between the various cortical visual areas, and about the single aspects of a visual stimulus for which the individual neurons in each area are most sensitive to. However, less is known about how the visual system deals with complex stimuli, and for what (if many) role the time-varying aspects of neurons in the visual system might play. This study will address these issues by recording from single neurons and pairs of neurons in several cortical visual areas (V1, V2, V4, and IT) of awake behaving rhesus monkeys, using both simple and more complex visual stimuli, exploring the responses of neurons to stimuli that are either flashed on or brought into the receptive fields of neurons via a saccade, and quantifying the variation over time of neuronal responses under these conditions. The results of this project should now only increase our basic understanding of how the brain works, but should also be valuable for such efforts as the design of visual prostheses, where knowledge of the principles of neuronal encoding is vital, and also in the clinical interpretation of visually evoked potentials, which could be improved by a more detailed knowledge of the time course of visual processing.