Abstract
We present a new method to explore the linear and nonlinear interactions within the classical receptive field (cRF) and between the cRF and the non-classical receptive field (ncRF). We extend the method of Ringach et al. (1997), based on presentation of a rapid sequence (20 ms per frame) of full-field oriented gratings of optimal spatial frequency, by using a set of tokens that includes not only gratings but also “blanks” (mean luminance), and presenting patches of these tokens simultaneously in both the cRF and one or more contiguous regions of the ncRF. Moreover, the order of presentation of these tokens is dictated by a non-binary m-sequence, typically of length 7