Abstract
To what extent emerging macroscopic perceptual features (i.e., Gestalt rules) can be predicted in V1 from the characteristics of neuronal integration? We use on vivo intracellular electrophysiology in the anesthetized brain, but where the impact of visuomotor exploration on retinal flow is controlled by simulating realistic but virtual classes of eye-movements (fixation, tremor, shift, saccade). By comparing synaptic echoes to different types of full field visual statistics (sparse noise, grating, natural scene, dense noise, apparent motion noise) in which the retinal effects of virtual eye-movements is, or is not, included, we have reconstructed the perceptual association field of visual cortical neurons extending 10 to 20° away from the classical discharge field. Our results show that there exists for any V1 cortical cell a fit between the spatio-temporal organization of its subthreshold "silent" (nCRF) and spiking (CRF) receptive fields with the dynamic features of the retinal flow produced by specific classes of eye-movements (saccades and fixation). The functional features of the resulting association field are interpreted as facilitating the integration of feed-forward inputs yet to come by propagating some kind of network belief of the possible presence of Gestalt-like percepts (co-alignment, common fate, filling-in). Our data support the existence of global association fields binding Form and Motion, which operate during low-level (non attentive) perception as early as V1 and become dynamically regulated by the retinal flow produced by natural eye-movements. Current work is supported by CNRS, and grants from ANR (NatStats and V1-complex) and the European Community FET-Bio-I3 programs (IP FP6: FACETS (015879), IP FP7: BRAINSCALES(269921) and Brain-i-nets (243914)).
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013