One attractive candidate for the locus of such adaptive changes is the middle temporal area (MT), which has been strongly implicated by electrophysiological (Britten, Shadlen, Newsome, & Movshon,
1992; Maunsell & Van Essen,
1983), lesion (Newsome, Wurtz, Dursteler, & Mikami,
1985) and microstimulation (Salzman, Murasugi, Britten, & Newsome,
1992) studies to play a critical role in motion perception. The vast majority of MT neurons are direction selective, and the detection of high TF signals (> 1 cycle/s) is mediated by direction-selective mechanisms (Watson, Thompson, Murphy, & Nachmias,
1980). MT neurons carry temporal precise information about motion transients, especially when random sequences of motion, such as those used in this study, are presented (Bair & Koch,
1996; Buracas, Zador, DeWeese, & Albright,
1998). MT responses are enhanced by spatial attention (Cook & Maunsell,
2002; Seidemann & Newsome,
1999; Treue & Maunsell,
1996), and the temporal integration seen in single-neuron responses can be altered by anesthetic state (Pack, Berezovskii, & Born,
2001) and the statistics of stimulation (Bair & Movshon,
2004). Finally, models based on MT response physiology have been constructed to explain the dynamics and statistics of motion-based decisions (Mazurek, Roitman, Ditterich, & Shadlen,
2003).