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The Journal of Neuroscience, May 27, 2009, 29(21):7031-7039; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0518-09.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Visual Field Map Clusters in Macaque Extrastriate Visual Cortex

Hauke Kolster,^1,2 Joseph B. Mandeville,^1,2 John T. Arsenault,¹ Leeland B. Ekstrom,^1,3,4 Lawrence L. Wald,^1,2,3 and Wim Vanduffel^1,2,5

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, ²Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, ³Harvard–Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, ⁴Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, and ⁵Laboratorium voor Neuro- en Psychofysiologie, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Medical School, Campus Gasthuisberg, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

Correspondence should be addressed to Wim Vanduffel, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129. Email: wim{at}nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

The macaque visual cortex contains >30 different functional visual areas, yet surprisingly little is known about the underlying organizational principles that structure its components into a complete "visual" unit. A recent model of visual cortical organization in humans suggests that visual field maps are organized as clusters. Clusters minimize axonal connections between individual field maps that represent common visual percepts, with different clusters thought to carry out different functions. Experimental support for this hypothesis, however, is lacking in macaques, leaving open the question of whether it is unique to humans or a more general model for primate vision. Here we show, using high-resolution blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging data in the awake monkey at 7 T, that the middle temporal area (area MT/V5) and its neighbors are organized as a cluster with a common foveal representation and a circular eccentricity map. This novel view on the functional topography of area MT/V5 and satellites indicates that field map clusters are evolutionarily preserved and may be a fundamental organizational principle of the Old World primate visual cortex.

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Received Jan. 31, 2009; revised April 17, 2009; accepted April 19, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Wim Vanduffel, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129. Email: wim{at}nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				L. B. Ekstrom, P. R. Roelfsema, J. T. Arsenault, H. Kolster, and W. Vanduffel Modulation of the Contrast Response Function by Electrical Microstimulation of the Macaque Frontal Eye Field J. Neurosci., August 26, 2009; 29(34): 10683 - 10694. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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