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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 24, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(4):885-893; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhk043
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Feedforward Construction of the Receptive Field and Orientation Selectivity of Visual Neurons in the Pigeon

Da-Peng Li, Qian Xiao and Shu-Rong Wang

Laboratory for Visual Information Processing, State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China

Address correspondence to Shu-Rong Wang, Laboratory for Visual Information Processing, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 15 Datun Road, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China. Email: wangsr{at}sun5.ibp.ac.cn.

How the receptive field (RF) of visual cells is formed and how to explain the orientation selectivity have been intensely studied and debated. Here we provided direct electrophysiological evidence by single-unit recording and electrophysiological mapping that the elongated excitatory RF of a visual cell in the pigeon nucleus isthmi is constructed from aligned circular excitatory RFs of tectal cells, whereas its inhibitory RF originates from intranuclear inhibitory circuits. The orientation selectivity of an isthmic cell is mainly determined by its excitatory RF and sharply tuned by its inhibitory RF. Retrograde tracing showed that the tectal cells converging onto an isthmic cell are arranged in a narrow dorsoventral column in the tectum. According to the retinotopic map on the tectum, the excitatory RFs of these tectal cells are aligned in a line orthogonal to the horizontal meridian of the visual field in agreement with the result obtained by electrophysiological mapping.

Key Words: feedforward convergence • nucleus isthmi • optic tectum • orientation selectivity • visual system


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