Spectral Characteristics of Phase Sensitivity and Discharge Rate of Neurons in the Ascending Tectofugal Visual System

Abstract

Drifting gratings can modulate the activity of visual neurons at the temporal frequency of the stimulus. In order to characterize the temporal frequency modulation in the cat’s ascending tectofugal visual system, we recorded the activity of single neurons in the superior colliculus, the suprageniculate nucleus, and the anterior ectosylvian cortex during visual stimulation with drifting sine-wave gratings. In response to such stimuli, neurons in each structure showed an increase in firing rate and/or oscillatory modulated firing at the temporal frequency of the stimulus (phase sensitivity). To obtain a more complete characterization of the neural responses in spatiotemporal frequency domain, we analyzed the mean firing rate and the strength of the oscillatory modulations measured by the standardized Fourier component of the response at the temporal frequency of the stimulus. We show that the spatiotemporal stimulus parameters that elicit maximal oscillations often differ from those that elicit a maximal discharge rate. Furthermore, the temporal modulation and discharge-rate spectral receptive fields often do not overlap, suggesting that the detection range for visual stimuli provided jointly by modulated and unmodulated response components is larger than the range provided by a one response component.

Primary visual cortex injury produces loss of inhibitory neurons and long-term visual circuit dysfunction

“…LFP signal was normalized using z-score standardization as we have done previously (Foik et al, 2015;Wypych et al, 2012Wypych et al, , 2014. Amplitude of response was calculated as a difference between the peak of the positive and negative components of the VEP.…”