Abstract
Stimulation outside the receptive field of a primary visual cortical (V1) neuron reveals intracortical neural interactions1,2,3,4,5,6. However, previous investigators implicitly or explicitly considered the extent of cortical spatial summation and, therefore, the size of the classical receptive field to be fixed and independent of stimulus characteristics or of surrounding context. On the contrary, we found that the extent of spatial summation in macaque V1 neurons depended on contrast, and was on average 2.3-fold greater at low contrast. This adaptive increase in spatial summation at low contrast was seen in cells throughout V1 and was independent of surround inhibition.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Shasta Sabo and Haim Sompolinsky for their comments. Lorraine Smith assisted in the histological reconstruction and during physiology experiments. This work was supported by National Institute of Health grants EY01472 and EY08300 and Sloan Foundation Grant in Theoretical Neuroscience 97-12-3.
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Sceniak, M., Ringach, D., Hawken, M. et al. Contrast's effect on spatial summation by macaque V1 neurons. Nat Neurosci 2, 733–739 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/11197
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/11197
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