PARALLEL INFORMATION PROCESSING OF THE VISUAL SYSTEM

我们未来五年的研究重点将是确定纹状外视皮质区的功能以及其中的神经元如何执行编码操作。我们正在对恒河猴进行的研究表明，纹外皮质区域并没有像之前所说的那样进化，以分别分析视觉的不同基本方面，如颜色、深度、运动、形状和质地。相反，进行更高层次分析的条带外区域比人们想象的要多得多。这些区域共同处理几个视觉属性，并且已经部分地进化以便于在三维空间中识别物体，并在物体被部分遮挡或在不同照明条件下从不同角度看到物体时识别物体。学习和在记忆中存储视觉对象的能力是这一过程的重要组成部分。为了验证这些假设，我们计划在我们的研究中采用三种实验程序：(1)单电极和多电极记录，以评估纹外区域神经元的反应特性；(2)植入电极阵列的慢性记录，以确定细胞在学习新视觉对象的过程中的反应特性是如何改变的；以及(3)评估动物在移除选定的纹外皮质区域后，在各种测试中的视觉能力。这项拟议的工作具有重要的临床意义，因为它将服务于表征各种视觉皮质区域的功能。

The focus of our research for the next five years will be to determine the functions of extrastriate visual cortical areas and how the neurons therein perform coding operations. Our ongoing work on rhesus monkeys suggests that extrastriate cortical areas did not evolve, as had been previously suggested, to separately analyze different basic aspects of vision such as color, depth, motion, form, and texture. Instead, many more extrastriate areas engage in higher-level analyses than had been thought. These areas co-process several visual attributes and have, in part, evolved to facilitate object recognition in three dimensional space and to recognize objects when they are partially occluded or are seen from different perspectives under various conditions of illumination. The ability to learn and store visual objects in memory is an essential part of this process. To test these hypotheses we plan to apply three kinds of experimental procedures in our research: (1) recordings with single and multiple electrodes to assess the response properties of neurons in extrastriate areas using three dimensional stimuli that are transformed in various ways, (2) chronic recordings with implanted electrode arrays to determine how the response properties of cells are altered during the process of learning new visual objects, and (3) assessment of the visual capacities of animals on a broad range of tests after the removal of selected extrastriate cortical areas. The proposed work has important clinical relevance as it will serve characterize the functions of various visual cortical areas.