Neural Mechanisms of Motion Sensitivity in V1 and MT

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A formal theory of motion systems, distinguishing the contributions of three independent motion mechanisms to human motion perception, is applied to neurophysiology. This framework is applied to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to drifting luminance, texture, and color in the visual cortices of awake, behaving primates. The elucidation of neural mechanisms, based on sensitivity measured to different motion stimuli, is made difficult by motion integration and stimulus distortions, factors obscuring basic properties of motion mechanisms, such as the motion computation's locus, algorithm and relationship to other mechanisms. The proposed work addresses these issues by (1) identifying and removing aberrant luminance motion signals from drifting texture and color, (2) identifying the motion algorithms, (motionenergy vs. feature-based), underlying neural sensitivity, and (3) distinguishing the contributions of motion computation and motion integration to neural sensitivity. Decomposing neural sensitivity to luminance, texture, and chromatic motion, using a framework developed to distinguish mechanisms of motion perception, may similarly distinguish mechanisms underlying neural motion sensitivity in primates.