Visual Responses in V1 of Freely Viewing Monkeys
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
We have developed techniques to study the response properties of single units in V1 of alert non-fixating macaque monkeys. We map the orientation preference and the receptive field of each single unit using stimuli that do not require the animal to fixate. We then allow the animal to freely view simple and complex images while we record from these units. For each spike, we record the position of the eyes at a given interval preceding its occurrence; this should reveal the parts of the image that lead to the cell's firing. V1 cells in the alert monkey tend to have higher spontaneous activity than in the anesthetized monkey, and this high background firing usually obscured the specific responses in activity maps for complex images. We found that the response patterns of neurons gave surprisingly poor reflections of what the animal had been viewing, unless we restricted the analysis to bursts...
