Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 27, Issue 19, Pages 5063-5067Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0835-07.2007
Keywords
visual cortex; contrast response; luminance response; transient stimulation; neural coding; natural scene statistics
Categories
Funding
- NEI NIH HHS [EY02688, R01 EY002688] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
During normal saccadic inspection of natural images, the receptive fields of cortical neurons are bombarded with frequent simultaneous changes in local mean luminance and contrast, yet there have been no systematic studies of how cortical neurons respond to such stimulation. The responses of single neurons in the primary visual cortex of the cat were measured for 200 ms presentations of sine-wave gratings confined to the conventional receptive field. Both local mean luminance and contrast were parametrically and randomly varied over the 1-1.5 log unit ranges that are typical of natural images. We find that responses are strongly modulated by both the local mean luminance and contrast, but in an approximately separable manner: the contrast response function is approximately invariant except for a scale factor that depends on the local mean luminance. The shape of the temporal response profiles were found to be approximately invariant with contrast, but were strongly affected by the local mean luminance. The results suggest that most, if not all, cortical neurons carry substantial local luminance information.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available