rapid dynamics of contrast responses in the cat primary visual cortex快速的动态对比反应猫初级视觉皮层.pdfVIP

Rapid Dynamics of Contrast Responses in the Cat Primary Visual Cortex 1,2 1,2 1 Ming Hu , Yong Wang , Yi Wang * 1 State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 2 Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Abstract The visual information we receive during natural vision changes rapidly and continuously. The visual system must adapt to the spatiotemporal contents of the environment in order to efficiently process the dynamic signals. However, neuronal responses to luminance contrast are usually measured using drifting or stationary gratings presented for a prolonged duration. Since motion in our visual field is continuous, the signals received by the visual system contain an abundance of transient components in the contrast domain. Here using a modified reverse correlation method, we studied the properties of responses of neurons in the cat primary visual cortex to different contrasts of grating stimuli presented statically and transiently for 40 ms, and showed that neurons can effectively discriminate the rapidly changing contrasts. The change in the contrast response function (CRF) over time mainly consisted of an increment in contrast gain (CRF shifts to left) in the developing phase of temporal responses and a decrement in response gain (CRF shifts downward) in the decay phase. When the distribution range of stimulus contrasts was increased, neurons demonstrated decrement in contrast gain and response gain. Our results suggest that contrast gain control (contrast adaptation) and response gain control mechanisms are well established during the first tens of milliseconds after stimulus onset and may cooperatively mediate the rapid dynamic respo