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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 15, 2003, 23(8):3515
Contribution of Middle Temporal Area to Coarse Depth
Discrimination: Comparison of Neuronal and Psychophysical Sensitivity
Takanori
Uka and
Gregory C.
DeAngelis
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University
School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110
Recent work suggests that the middle temporal (MT) area contributes
to depth perception in addition to its well established roles in motion
perception. To determine whether single MT neurons carry disparity
signals with sufficient fidelity to account for depth perception, we
have compared neuronal and psychophysical sensitivity to disparity
while monkeys discriminated between two coarse disparities (near vs
far) in the presence of noise. The strength of the visual stimulus was
titrated around psychophysical threshold by varying the percentage of
binocularly correlated dots in a random dot stereogram. We find that
the average MT neuron has sensitivity equal to that of the monkey, as
was reported previously for direction discrimination in MT. We
further address some important factors that could bias the
neuronal/psychophysical sensitivity comparison, including the
possibility that monkeys reach a decision before the end of the
stimulus presentation. Unlike the predictions of a simple model that
uses Poisson spiking statistics, the sensitivity of many MT neurons has
little dependence on the time interval over which spikes are counted to
compute a neuronal threshold. Thus the response properties of many MT
neurons appear to be adapted for rapid discrimination of depth, and we
describe how temporal variations in both signal and noise contribute to
this effect. We therefore predicted that psychophysical thresholds
should exhibit little dependence on viewing duration in our task, and
this was confirmed by additional behavioral experiments. Overall, our
findings show that MT is well suited to provide sensory signals that
form the basis for perceptual judgments of depth.
Key words:
visual cortex; extrastriate; stereopsis; binocular
disparity; neuronal sensitivity; depth discrimination
Copyright © 2003 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/03/2383515-16$05.00/0
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