A Motion Direction Map in Macaque V2

Abstract

SUMMARY In mammals, the perception of motion starts with direction-selective neurons in the visual cortex. Despite numerous studies in monkey V1 and V2 (primary and second visual cortex), there has been no evidence of direction maps in these areas. In the present study, we used optical imaging methods to study the organization of motion response in Macaque monkey V1 and V2. In contrast to the findings in other mammals (e.g. cats and ferrets), we found no direction maps in macaque V1. Robust direction maps, however, were found in V2 thick/pale stripes and avoided thin stripes. In many cases direction maps were located within thick stripes and exhibited pinwheel or linear organizations. The presence of motion maps in V2 points to a new found prominence of V2 in motion processing, either for contributing to motion perception in the dorsal pathway and/or for motion-cue dependent form perception in the ventral pathway.

Spatial structure of neuronal receptive field in awake monkey secondary visual cortex (V2)

“…Further postmortem identification with CO staining was not performed because the monkeys are still alive. The colocalization of CO thin stripes and color domains of intrinsic signal was previously verified by CO staining (30), whereas other evidence from intrinsic signals suggests that direction domains fall within thick stripes (31). Based on these previous findings, our determination of thin stripes is likely to be accurate, but that of thick stripes may be an underestimate.…”

“…A hallmark of neocortical circuits is the nonrandom spatial organization of neurons based on their functional properties. Previous studies on monkeys using cytochrome oxidase (CO) staining have delineated area V2 into alternating thin, pale, and thick stripes (25)(26)(27), in which color, orientation, and direction selective cells are preferentially located, respectively (1,(28)(29)(30)(31). We next inquired whether cells with identified RF subunit structures are organized into different V2 stripes.…”

Size Precedes View: Developmental Emergence of Invariant Object Representations in Lateral Occipital Complex

“…Some of these additional regions are assumed to be associated with the dorsal visual stream, which is not too surprising given that the experimental paradigms adopted typically tap motion processing in the context of action planning, saccadic movements or attention, all preferentially engage the dorsal pathway (Newsome et al, 1989;Treue and Maunsell, 1996;Newsome, 1997). Although ventral stream regions have also been implicated in motion processing (De Valois et al, 2000;Tolias et al, 2005;Lu et al, 2010;Li et al, 2013), and there have been suggestions that intact motion perception relies on a combination of dorsal and ventral-related contributions (De Valois et al, 2000), and that ventral cortex might be important for slow motion while dorsal cortex is important for fast motion (Gegenfurtner and Hawken, 1996;Thompson et al, 2006;Hayward et al, 2011), the necessary role of ventral visual cortex in motion perception has not been demonstrated. Our findings implicate ventral visual cortex in central motion perception; this is true, critically, not only for slow motion (at 0.055-0.08 /s, as in the motion detection task, or 5.4 /s in the motion coherence task), but also for very fast motions (motion coherence at 27.27 /s).…”

“…MT/MST in humans) are anatomically located at the intersection of the dorsal and ventral streams in lateral temporal cortex (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982;Goodale and Milner, 1992), and are thus not exclusively within the dorsal pathway. Further findings, primarily from non-human primates, indicate that ventral visual cortices may play an important functional role in motion perception Ungerleider and Desimone, 1986;Desimone and Schein, 1987;Mountcastle et al, 1987;Ferrera et al, 1994;De Valois et al, 2000;Ferrera and Maunsell, 2005;Tolias et al, 2005;Lu et al, 2010), and it has also been suggested that slower motion (53 /s) might be supported by the ventral pathway following the sustained nature of the parvocellular system, whereas faster motion is supported by the dorsal more transient magnocellular pathway (Gegenfurtner and Hawken, 1996;Thompson et al, 2006;Hayward et al, 2011). It is also the case that visual motion is engaged in form-associated functions (Kourtzi et al, 2008).…”

Infrared neural stimulation: a new stimulation tool for central nervous system applications

“…The Roe lab at Vanderbilt University is a pioneer of the chronically implanted optical window technique, a method that allows unobscured views of the cortical surface through a biocompatible artificial membrane and adapts it for use in combined imaging and optical stimulation studies. 19,[22][23][24][25][26] Collaborating with the Jansen group, they conducted intrinsic signal imaging of primary visual cortex in response to INS stimulation in anesthetized macaque monkeys [ Fig. 1(a) Fig.…”