TY - JOUR
T1 - Contextual modulation of V1 receptive fields depends on their spatial symmetry
AU - Sharpee, Tatyana O.
AU - Victor, Jonathan D.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (NSF PHY-0822283), a grant from the Swartz Foundation and the Mentored Quantitative Career Development Award MH068904 to TS from NIMH, and EY9314 to JDV. Computing resources were provided by the National Science Foundation through Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure at the Distributed Terascale Facility and Terascale Extensions.
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - The apparent receptive field characteristics of sensory neurons depend on the statistics of the stimulus ensemble - a nonlinear phenomenon often called contextual modulation. Since visual cortical receptive fields determined from simple stimuli typically do not predict responses to complex stimuli, understanding contextual modulation is crucial to understanding responses to natural scenes. To analyze contextual modulation, we examined how apparent receptive fields differ for two stimulus ensembles that are matched in first- and second-order statistics, but differ in their feature content: one ensemble is enriched in elongated contours. To identify systematic trends across the neural population, we used a multidimensional scaling method, the Procrustes transformation. We found that contextual modulation of receptive field components increases with their spatial extent. More surprisingly, we also found that odd-symmetric components change systematically, but even-symmetric components do not. This symmetry dependence suggests that contextual modulation is driven by oriented On/ Off dyads, i.e., modulation of the strength of intracortically-generated signals.
AB - The apparent receptive field characteristics of sensory neurons depend on the statistics of the stimulus ensemble - a nonlinear phenomenon often called contextual modulation. Since visual cortical receptive fields determined from simple stimuli typically do not predict responses to complex stimuli, understanding contextual modulation is crucial to understanding responses to natural scenes. To analyze contextual modulation, we examined how apparent receptive fields differ for two stimulus ensembles that are matched in first- and second-order statistics, but differ in their feature content: one ensemble is enriched in elongated contours. To identify systematic trends across the neural population, we used a multidimensional scaling method, the Procrustes transformation. We found that contextual modulation of receptive field components increases with their spatial extent. More surprisingly, we also found that odd-symmetric components change systematically, but even-symmetric components do not. This symmetry dependence suggests that contextual modulation is driven by oriented On/ Off dyads, i.e., modulation of the strength of intracortically-generated signals.
KW - Linear-nonlinear model
KW - Plasticity
KW - Primary visual cortex
KW - Reverse correlation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=62349084874&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10827-008-0107-5
DO - 10.1007/s10827-008-0107-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 18679785
AN - SCOPUS:62349084874
SN - 0929-5313
VL - 26
SP - 203
EP - 218
JO - Journal of Computational Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Computational Neuroscience
IS - 2
ER -