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Surround suppression sharpens orientation tuning in the cat primary visual cortex
- Source :
- European Journal of Neuroscience. 29:1035-1046
- Publication Year :
- 2009
- Publisher :
- Wiley, 2009.
-
Abstract
- In the primary visual cortex (V1), the response of a neuron to stimulation of its classical receptive field (CRF) is suppressed by concurrent stimulation of the extraclassical receptive field (ECRF), a phenomenon termed 'surround suppression'. It is also known that the orientation tuning of V1 neurons becomes sharper as the size of the stimulus increases beyond the CRF. However, there have been few quantitative investigations of the relationship between sharpening of orientation tuning and surround suppression. We examined this relationship in 73 V1 neurons recorded from anesthetized and paralysed cats using sinusoidal grating patches as stimuli. We found that sharpening of orientation tuning was significantly correlated with the strength of surround suppression for large stimuli that cover both CRF and ECRF. Furthermore, simulation analysis using a variety of tuning widths and most suppressive orientation of orientation-tuned surround suppression demonstrated that broadly orientation-tuned surround suppression sharpens orientation tuning for large gratings without shift in optimal orientation. Our findings suggest that one of the functional roles of surround suppression in V1 is enhancement of orientation discrimination for large and uniformly patterned objects.
- Subjects :
- Sensory Receptor Cells
genetic structures
Surround suppression
Photic Stimulation
Models, Neurological
Action Potentials
Sharpening
Visual system
Stimulus (physiology)
Contrast Sensitivity
Orientation
Reaction Time
medicine
Animals
Computer Simulation
Visual Pathways
Visual Cortex
Physics
Communication
business.industry
Spectrum Analysis
General Neuroscience
Neural Inhibition
Visual cortex
medicine.anatomical_structure
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Receptive field
Cats
business
Neuroscience
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14609568 and 0953816X
- Volume :
- 29
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- European Journal of Neuroscience
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....968454f1c953aa2eb068781c4fd7d786