Topic: spatial frequency

The primary visual cortex (V1) directly projects to the superior colliculus (SC) and is believed to provide sensory drive for eye movements. Consistent with this, a majority of saccade-related SC neurons also exhibit short-latency, stimulus-driven visual responses, which are additionally feature-tuned. However, direct neurophysiological comparisons of the visual response properties of the two anatomically-connected brain areas are surprisingly lacking, especially with respect to active looking behaviors. I will describe a series of experiments characterizing visual response properties in prima

An appealing hypothesis states that visual neurons in the brain are sensitive to the statistical properties of natural images. Neurophysiology and fMRI studies have tested neural sensitivity to images altered to exhibit either typical or atypical statistics. A general finding is that visual cortical neurons respond more strongly to images with natural statistics, and that this can vary across the visual hierarchy. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved human-level performance in vision tasks and have been used as visual cortex models. However, CNN responses to images with altered s

Previous work looking at individual differences in face identity processing (FIP) has found that most commonly used lab-based performance assessments are unfortunately not sufficiently sensitive on their own for measuring performance in both the upper and lower tails of the general population simultaneously. So more recently, researchers have begun incorporating multiple testing procedures into their assessments. Still, though, the growing consensus seems to be that at the individual level, there is quite a bit of variability between test scores. The overall consequence of this is that extreme

Callosal connections (CC) in early sensory areas are believed to act as conditional drivers because their impact depends on all other inputs reaching their contralateral targets for a given task. In the intact cat brain, CC to the 17/18-transition zone (TZ) act mainly as modulators, rarely as direct drivers, depending on both target and stimulus properties. Given that preferred spatial frequency (SF) gradually changes from area 17 towards 18 we suspected CC to reflect the ratio of x- and y- cell driven retinogeniculate-cortical inputs. We thus recorded monocular and binocular responses to diff