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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 1, 2004, 24(35):7690-7698; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2384-04.2004

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Visual Neurons in the Pigeon Brain Encode the Acceleration of Stimulus Motion

Peng Cao,^1,2 Yong Gu,¹ and Shu-Rong Wang¹

¹Laboratory for Visual Information Processing, Institute of Biophysics, and ²Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Seeing target motion is a vital capability of the visual system in humans and animals. Physically, motion is described by its acceleration, speed, and direction. Motion-sensitive neurons in all the visual areas examined to date are selective for the direction and speed of motion. Here, we show by single-unit recording that one-third of motion-sensitive neurons in the pigeon's pretectal nucleus also encode the acceleration of stimulus motion. These neurons are characterized by plateau-shaped speed-tuning curves in which the firing rate is the same over a wide range of speeds, a feature that allows these neurons to encode unambiguously the rate of change of speed over time. Acceleration-sensitive neurons also show transient responses to the offset of motion in the preferred and/or nonpreferred directions; acceleration-insensitive neurons do not. We observed the same sensitivity to target acceleration for brief ramps of stimulus speed and for sinusoidal modulation of speed. The locations of acceleration-sensitive and -insensitive neurons are segregated in the pretectal nucleus. The visual responses of pretectal neurons indicate that the visual and vestibular systems share not only a spatial but also a temporal reference frame that can detect the acceleration produced by self-motion of an organism.

Key words: acceleration; optokinetic nystagmus; receptive field; speed-tuning curve; vestibular system; visual system

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Received April 7, 2004; revised July 21, 2004; accepted July 23, 2004.

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