Binocular Disparity Tuning and Visual–Vestibular Congruency of Multisensory Neurons in Macaque Parietal Cortex

Yang, Yun; Liu, Sheng; Chowdhury, Syed A.; DeAngelis, Gregory C.; Angelaki, Dora E.

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.4032-11.2011

Cited by 35 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…This finding is in line with previous results from Colby et al (1993) and our own group (Bremmer and Kubischik, 1999) and has recently been confirmed by Yang et al (2011). A majority of cells with response peaks for stimuli in near space does not necessarily result in a stronger population discharge for near stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

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Encoding of movement in near extrapersonal space in primate area VIP

Bremmer¹,

Schlack²,

Kaminiarz³

et al. 2013

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Many neurons in the macaque ventral intraparietal area (VIP) are multimodal, i.e., they respond not only to visual but also to tactile, auditory and vestibular stimulation. Anatomical studies have shown distinct projections between area VIP and a region of premotor cortex controlling head movements. A specific function of area VIP could be to guide movements in order to head for and/or to avoid objects in near extrapersonal space. This behavioral role would require a consistent representation of visual motion within 3-D space and enhanced activity for nearby motion signals. Accordingly, in our present study we investigated whether neurons in area VIP are sensitive to moving visual stimuli containing depth signals from horizontal disparity. We recorded single unit activity from area VIP of two awake behaving monkeys (Macaca mulatta) fixating a central target on a projection screen. Sensitivity of neurons to horizontal disparity was assessed by presenting large field moving images (random dot fields) stereoscopically to the two eyes by means of LCD shutter goggles synchronized with the stimulus computer. During an individual trial, stimuli had one of seven different disparity values ranging from 3° uncrossed- (far) to 3° crossed- (near) disparity in 1° steps. Stimuli moved at constant speed in all simulated depth planes. Different disparity values were presented across trials in pseudo-randomized order. Sixty-one percent of the motion sensitive cells had a statistically significant selectivity for the horizontal disparity of the stimulus (p < 0.05, distribution free ANOVA). Seventy-five percent of them preferred crossed-disparity values, i.e., moving stimuli in near space, with the highest mean activity for the nearest stimulus. At the population level, preferred direction of visual stimulus motion was not affected by horizontal disparity. Thus, our findings are in agreement with the behavioral role of area VIP in the representation of movement in near extrapersonal space.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Bremmer and Kubischik presented preliminary data showing by means of stereoscopic presentation a preference of VIP neurons to respond to stimuli presented in near as compared to far space (Bremmer and Kubischik, 1999). These latter findings were recently confirmed by Yang et al (2011). …”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Encoding of movement in near extrapersonal space in primate area VIP

Bremmer¹,

Schlack²,

Kaminiarz³

et al. 2013

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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“…Both areas show selectivity for optic flow patterns that simulate self-motion, as well as directional tuning for inertial motion in darkness (MSTd: Duffy and Wurtz, 1995; Lappe et al, 1996; Duffy, 1998; Page and Duffy, 2003; Gu et al, 2006) (VIP: Bremmer et al, 2002; Schlack et al, 2002; Zhang et al, 2004; Zhang and Britten, 2010; Chen et al, 2011a). Although some differences in response properties between VIP and MSTd have been noted (Maciokas and Britten, 2010; Chen et al, 2011c; Yang et al, 2011), a better understanding of the respective roles of these areas in visually-guided navigation remains an important goal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional Specializations of the Ventral Intraparietal Area for Multisensory Heading Discrimination

2013

Self Cite

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The ventral intraparietal area (VIP) of the macaque brain is a multimodal cortical region with directionally-selective responses to visual and vestibular stimuli. To explore how these signals contribute to self-motion perception, neural activity in VIP was monitored while macaques performed a fine heading discrimination task based on vestibular, visual, or multisensory cues. For neurons with congruent visual and vestibular heading tuning, discrimination thresholds improved during multisensory stimulation, suggesting that VIP (like area MSTd) may contribute to the improved perceptual discrimination seen during cue combination. Unlike MSTd, however, few VIP neurons showed opposite visual/vestibular tuning over the range of headings relevant to behavior, and those few cells showed reduced sensitivity under cue combination. Our data suggest that the heading tuning of some VIP neurons may be locally remodeled to increase the proportion of cells with congruent tuning over the behaviorally relevant stimulus range. VIP neurons also showed much stronger trial-by-trial correlations with perceptual decisions (choice probabilities, CPs) than MSTd neurons. While this may suggest that VIP neurons are more strongly linked to heading perception, we also find that correlated noise is much stronger among pairs of VIP neurons, with noise correlations averaging 0.14 in VIP as compared to 0.04 in MSTd. Thus, the large CPs in VIP could be a consequence of strong interneuronal correlations. Together, our findings suggest that VIP neurons show specializations that may make them well-equipped to play a role in multisensory integration for heading perception.

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“…Such visual representations of head translation combine with vestibular head translation signals (Liu and Angelaki, 2009) to improve multi-modal heading discrimination (Gu et al, 2008). Visual and vestibular input concerning head rotations is also found in area MST of the monkey but its relation to the self-rotation percept is not clear because visual and vestibular rotation preferences are opposite in virtually all cells (Takahashi et al, 2007), perhaps pointing to an involvement in object perception (Gu et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2011). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual perception of axes of head rotation

Arnoldussen¹,

Goossens²,

Berg³

2013

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Registration of ego-motion is important to accurately navigate through space. Movements of the head and eye relative to space are registered through the vestibular system and optical flow, respectively. Here, we address three questions concerning the visual registration of self-rotation. (1) Eye-in-head movements provide a link between the motion signals received by sensors in the moving eye and sensors in the moving head. How are these signals combined into an ego-rotation percept? We combined optic flow of simulated forward and rotational motion of the eye with different levels of eye-in-head rotation for a stationary head. We dissociated simulated gaze rotation and head rotation by different levels of eye-in-head pursuit. We found that perceived rotation matches simulated head- not gaze-rotation. This rejects a model for perceived self-rotation that relies on the rotation of the gaze line. Rather, eye-in-head signals serve to transform the optic flow's rotation information, that specifies rotation of the scene relative to the eye, into a rotation relative to the head. This suggests that transformed visual self-rotation signals may combine with vestibular signals. (2) Do transformed visual self-rotation signals reflect the arrangement of the semi-circular canals (SCC)? Previously, we found sub-regions within MST and V6+ that respond to the speed of the simulated head rotation. Here, we re-analyzed those Blood oxygenated level-dependent (BOLD) signals for the presence of a spatial dissociation related to the axes of visually simulated head rotation, such as have been found in sub-cortical regions of various animals. Contrary, we found a rather uniform BOLD response to simulated rotation along the three SCC axes. (3) We investigated if subject's sensitivity to the direction of the head rotation axis shows SCC axes specifcity. We found that sensitivity to head rotation is rather uniformly distributed, suggesting that in human cortex, visuo-vestibular integration is not arranged into the SCC frame.

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Binocular Disparity Tuning and Visual–Vestibular Congruency of Multisensory Neurons in Macaque Parietal Cortex

Cited by 35 publications

References 35 publications

Encoding of movement in near extrapersonal space in primate area VIP

Encoding of movement in near extrapersonal space in primate area VIP

Functional Specializations of the Ventral Intraparietal Area for Multisensory Heading Discrimination

Visual perception of axes of head rotation

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