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Development of visual motion integration involves coordination of multiple cortical stages.

ABSTRACT: A central feature of cortical function is hierarchical processing of information. Little is currently known about how cortical processing cascades develop. Here, we investigate the joint development of two nodes of the ferret's visual motion pathway, primary visual cortex (V1), and higher-level area PSS. In adult animals, motion processing transitions from local to global computations between these areas. We now show that PSS global motion signals emerge a week after the development of V1 and PSS direction selectivity. Crucially, V1 responses to more complex motion stimuli change in parallel, in a manner consistent with supporting increased PSS motion integration. At the same time, these V1 responses depend on feedback from PSS. Our findings suggest that development does not just proceed in parallel in different visual areas, it is coordinated across network nodes. This has important implications for understanding how visual experience and developmental disorders can influence the developing visual system.

SUBMITTER: Lempel AA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7984838 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Development of visual motion integration involves coordination of multiple cortical stages.

Lempel Augusto A AA Nielsen Kristina J KJ

eLife 20210322

A central feature of cortical function is hierarchical processing of information. Little is currently known about how cortical processing cascades develop. Here, we investigate the joint development of two nodes of the ferret's visual motion pathway, primary visual cortex (V1), and higher-level area PSS. In adult animals, motion processing transitions from local to global computations between these areas. We now show that PSS global motion signals emerge a week after the development of V1 and PS ...[more]

PMID: 33749595

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Project description:Segmenting objects from each other and their background is critical for vision. The speed at which objects move provides a salient cue for segmentation. However, how the visual system represents and differentiates multiple speeds is largely unknown. Here we investigated the neural encoding of multiple speeds of overlapping stimuli in the primate visual cortex. We first characterized the perceptual capacity of human and monkey subjects to segment spatially overlapping stimuli moving at different speeds. We then determined how neurons in the motion-sensitive, middle-temporal (MT) cortex of macaque monkeys encode multiple speeds. We made a novel finding that the responses of MT neurons to two speeds of overlapping stimuli showed a robust bias toward the faster speed component when both speeds were slow (≤ 20°/s). The faster-speed bias occurred even when a neuron had a slow preferred speed and responded more strongly to the slower component than the faster component when presented alone. The faster-speed bias emerged very early in neuronal response and was robust over time and to manipulations of motion direction and attention. As the stimulus speed increased, the faster-speed bias changed to response averaging. Our finding can be explained by a modified divisive normalization model, in which the weights for the speed components are proportional to the responses of a population of neurons elicited by the individual speeds. Our results suggest that the neuron population, referred to as the weighting pool, includes neurons that have a broad range of speed preferences. As a result, the response weights for the speed components are determined by the stimulus speeds and invariant to the speed preferences of individual neurons. Our findings help to define the neural encoding rule of multiple stimuli and provide new insight into the underlying neural mechanisms. The faster-speed bias would benefit behavioral tasks such as figure-ground segregation if figural objects tend to move faster than the background in the natural environment.

Dataset Information

Development of visual motion integration involves coordination of multiple cortical stages.

Publications

Development of visual motion integration involves coordination of multiple cortical stages.

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