Skip to main content

Main menu

  • HOME
  • CONTENT
    • Early Release
    • Featured
    • Current Issue
    • Issue Archive
    • Collections
    • Podcast
  • ALERTS
  • FOR AUTHORS
    • Information for Authors
    • Fees
    • Journal Clubs
    • eLetters
    • Submit
  • EDITORIAL BOARD
  • ABOUT
    • Overview
    • Advertise
    • For the Media
    • Rights and Permissions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Feedback
  • SUBSCRIBE

User menu

  • Log out
  • Log in
  • My Cart

Search

  • Advanced search
Journal of Neuroscience
  • Log out
  • Log in
  • My Cart
Journal of Neuroscience

Advanced Search

Submit a Manuscript
  • HOME
  • CONTENT
    • Early Release
    • Featured
    • Current Issue
    • Issue Archive
    • Collections
    • Podcast
  • ALERTS
  • FOR AUTHORS
    • Information for Authors
    • Fees
    • Journal Clubs
    • eLetters
    • Submit
  • EDITORIAL BOARD
  • ABOUT
    • Overview
    • Advertise
    • For the Media
    • Rights and Permissions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Feedback
  • SUBSCRIBE
PreviousNext
Cover ArticleArticles, Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive

Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns

Jeremy Freeman, Gijs Joost Brouwer, David J. Heeger and Elisha P. Merriam
Journal of Neuroscience 30 March 2011, 31 (13) 4792-4804; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5160-10.2011
Jeremy Freeman
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Gijs Joost Brouwer
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
David J. Heeger
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Elisha P. Merriam
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Article
  • Figures & Data
  • Info & Metrics
  • eLetters
  • PDF
Loading

Published eLetters

Guidelines

As a forum for professional feedback, submissions of letters are open to all. You do not need to be a subscriber. To avoid redundancy, we urge you to read other people's letters before submitting your own. Name, current appointment, place of work, and email address are required to send a letter, and will be published with your review. We also require that you declare any competing financial interests. Unprofessional submissions will not be considered or responded to.

Submit a Response to This Article
Compose eLetter

More information about text formats

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Author Information
First or given name, e.g. 'Peter'.
Your last, or family, name, e.g. 'MacMoody'.
Your email address, e.g. higgs-boson@gmail.com
Your role and/or occupation, e.g. 'Orthopedic Surgeon'.
Your organization or institution (if applicable), e.g. 'Royal Free Hospital'.
Statement of Competing Interests
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
3 + 14 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.

Vertical Tabs

Jump to comment:

  • Re:Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Elisha Merriam
    Submitted on: 17 December 2013
  • Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Colin W. Clifford
    Submitted on: 26 April 2011
  • Submitted on: (17 December 2013)
    Page navigation anchor for Re:Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Re:Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    • Elisha Merriam
    • Other Contributors:
      • Jeremy Freeman, David Heeger

    Thank you for the insightful comment. Please see our paper:

    Coarse-Scale Biases for Spirals and Orientation in Human Visual Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 2013, 33(50): 19695-19703

    Conflict of Interest:

    None declared

    Competing Interests: None declared.
  • Submitted on: (26 April 2011)
    Page navigation anchor for Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    • Colin W. Clifford, Professorial Research Fellow
    • Other Contributors:
      • Damien J. Mannion, Kiley J. Seymour, J. Scott McDonald, Andreas Bartels

    Re: Freeman J, Brouwer GJ, Heeger DJ, Merriam EP (2011) Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns. J Neurosci 31(13): 4792- 4804.

    Freeman et al. observed a coarse-scale topographic map of orientation preference in human V1. The map was tightly colocalized with the angular-position component of the retinotopic map - a bias towards radial orientations. They found that orientation decoding accuracy was deg...

    Show More

    Re: Freeman J, Brouwer GJ, Heeger DJ, Merriam EP (2011) Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns. J Neurosci 31(13): 4792- 4804.

    Freeman et al. observed a coarse-scale topographic map of orientation preference in human V1. The map was tightly colocalized with the angular-position component of the retinotopic map - a bias towards radial orientations. They found that orientation decoding accuracy was degraded by removing the angular-position map from the responses to different orientations, which was interpreted as "proving that the coarse- scale orientation map was necessary for orientation decoding".

    Radial bias can be avoided by the use of stimuli matched everywhere for their radial components, such as spirals of opposite sense. Previous studies have reported significant accuracy in discriminating anti- clockwise and clockwise spirals from patterns of activity in human V1 (Mannion et al., 2009; Seymour et al., 2010), leading to the conclusion that "the influence of a radial bias is not necessary for the discrimination of stimulus orientation on the basis of fMRI activity patterns" (Mannion et al., 2009).

    How can these apparently disparate conclusions be reconciled? One possibility is that the brief (1.5 second) presentation time of each orientation in the study by Freeman et al. coupled with the presence of a coarse radial bias in the resulting voxel time courses might have obscured the subtle variations observed by the previous studies that used spiral patterns as stimuli and presented them for longer periods of time (12-15 s). While we share the concern of Freeman et al. regarding the potential impact of coarse scale biases on orientation classification, we suggest that their failure to find significant orientation information in human V1 when radial bias is controlled for should be interpreted with caution.

    References:

    Mannion DJ, McDonald JS, Clifford CW (2009) Discrimination of the local orientation structure of spiral Glass patterns early in human visual cortex. Neuroimage 46: 511-515.

    Seymour KJ, Clifford CW, Logothetis NK, Bartels A (2010) Coding and binding of colour and form in visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex 20: 1946- 1954.

    Conflict of Interest:

    None declared

    Show Less
    Competing Interests: None declared.
Back to top

In this issue

The Journal of Neuroscience: 31 (13)
Journal of Neuroscience
Vol. 31, Issue 13
30 Mar 2011
  • Table of Contents
  • Table of Contents (PDF)
  • About the Cover
  • Index by author
  • Advertising (PDF)
  • Ed Board (PDF)
Email

Thank you for sharing this Journal of Neuroscience article.

NOTE: We request your email address only to inform the recipient that it was you who recommended this article, and that it is not junk mail. We do not retain these email addresses.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from Journal of Neuroscience
(Your Name) thought you would be interested in this article in Journal of Neuroscience.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Print
View Full Page PDF
Citation Tools
Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns
Jeremy Freeman, Gijs Joost Brouwer, David J. Heeger, Elisha P. Merriam
Journal of Neuroscience 30 March 2011, 31 (13) 4792-4804; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5160-10.2011

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Respond to this article
Request Permissions
Share
Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns
Jeremy Freeman, Gijs Joost Brouwer, David J. Heeger, Elisha P. Merriam
Journal of Neuroscience 30 March 2011, 31 (13) 4792-4804; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5160-10.2011
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Jump to section

  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Introduction
    • Materials and Methods
    • Results
    • Discussion
    • Footnotes
    • References
  • Figures & Data
  • Info & Metrics
  • eLetters
  • PDF

Responses to this article

Respond to this article

Jump to comment:

  • Re:Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Elisha Merriam
    Published on: 17 December 2013
  • Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Colin W. Clifford
    Published on: 26 April 2011
  • Published on: (17 December 2013)
    Page navigation anchor for Re:Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Re:Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    • Elisha Merriam
    • Other Contributors:
      • Jeremy Freeman, David Heeger

    Thank you for the insightful comment. Please see our paper:

    Coarse-Scale Biases for Spirals and Orientation in Human Visual Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 2013, 33(50): 19695-19703

    Conflict of Interest:

    None declared

    Competing Interests: None declared.
  • Published on: (26 April 2011)
    Page navigation anchor for Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    Are Coarse-Scale Orientation Maps Really Necessary for Orientation Decoding?
    • Colin W. Clifford, Professorial Research Fellow
    • Other Contributors:
      • Damien J. Mannion, Kiley J. Seymour, J. Scott McDonald, Andreas Bartels

    Re: Freeman J, Brouwer GJ, Heeger DJ, Merriam EP (2011) Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns. J Neurosci 31(13): 4792- 4804.

    Freeman et al. observed a coarse-scale topographic map of orientation preference in human V1. The map was tightly colocalized with the angular-position component of the retinotopic map - a bias towards radial orientations. They found that orientation decoding accuracy was deg...

    Show More

    Re: Freeman J, Brouwer GJ, Heeger DJ, Merriam EP (2011) Orientation Decoding Depends on Maps, Not Columns. J Neurosci 31(13): 4792- 4804.

    Freeman et al. observed a coarse-scale topographic map of orientation preference in human V1. The map was tightly colocalized with the angular-position component of the retinotopic map - a bias towards radial orientations. They found that orientation decoding accuracy was degraded by removing the angular-position map from the responses to different orientations, which was interpreted as "proving that the coarse- scale orientation map was necessary for orientation decoding".

    Radial bias can be avoided by the use of stimuli matched everywhere for their radial components, such as spirals of opposite sense. Previous studies have reported significant accuracy in discriminating anti- clockwise and clockwise spirals from patterns of activity in human V1 (Mannion et al., 2009; Seymour et al., 2010), leading to the conclusion that "the influence of a radial bias is not necessary for the discrimination of stimulus orientation on the basis of fMRI activity patterns" (Mannion et al., 2009).

    How can these apparently disparate conclusions be reconciled? One possibility is that the brief (1.5 second) presentation time of each orientation in the study by Freeman et al. coupled with the presence of a coarse radial bias in the resulting voxel time courses might have obscured the subtle variations observed by the previous studies that used spiral patterns as stimuli and presented them for longer periods of time (12-15 s). While we share the concern of Freeman et al. regarding the potential impact of coarse scale biases on orientation classification, we suggest that their failure to find significant orientation information in human V1 when radial bias is controlled for should be interpreted with caution.

    References:

    Mannion DJ, McDonald JS, Clifford CW (2009) Discrimination of the local orientation structure of spiral Glass patterns early in human visual cortex. Neuroimage 46: 511-515.

    Seymour KJ, Clifford CW, Logothetis NK, Bartels A (2010) Coding and binding of colour and form in visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex 20: 1946- 1954.

    Conflict of Interest:

    None declared

    Show Less
    Competing Interests: None declared.

Related Articles

Cited By...

More in this TOC Section

Articles

  • Choice Behavior Guided by Learned, But Not Innate, Taste Aversion Recruits the Orbitofrontal Cortex
  • Maturation of Spontaneous Firing Properties after Hearing Onset in Rat Auditory Nerve Fibers: Spontaneous Rates, Refractoriness, and Interfiber Correlations
  • Insulin Treatment Prevents Neuroinflammation and Neuronal Injury with Restored Neurobehavioral Function in Models of HIV/AIDS Neurodegeneration
Show more Articles

Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive

  • Episodic Reinstatement in the Medial Temporal Lobe
  • Musical Expertise Induces Audiovisual Integration of Abstract Congruency Rules
  • The Laminar Development of Direction Selectivity in Ferret Visual Cortex
Show more Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
  • Home
  • Alerts
  • Visit Society for Neuroscience on Facebook
  • Follow Society for Neuroscience on Twitter
  • Follow Society for Neuroscience on LinkedIn
  • Visit Society for Neuroscience on Youtube
  • Follow our RSS feeds

Content

  • Early Release
  • Current Issue
  • Issue Archive
  • Collections

Information

  • For Authors
  • For Advertisers
  • For the Media
  • For Subscribers

About

  • About the Journal
  • Editorial Board
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
(JNeurosci logo)
(SfN logo)

Copyright © 2023 by the Society for Neuroscience.
JNeurosci Online ISSN: 1529-2401

The ideas and opinions expressed in JNeurosci do not necessarily reflect those of SfN or the JNeurosci Editorial Board. Publication of an advertisement or other product mention in JNeurosci should not be construed as an endorsement of the manufacturer’s claims. SfN does not assume any responsibility for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from or related to any use of any material contained in JNeurosci.