title: Dynamic stabilization of receptive fields of cortical neurons (VI) during fixation of gaze in the macaque.
abstract: The positions of receptive field borders of striate cortical neurons were measured repeatedly in awake monkeys during attentive fixation of a small target. The border position, as marked by the onset of evoked activity in response to a moving stimulus, did not show the variability expected from previous measures of eye position variability during fixation. Measured variability was smaller than expected. Trial-by-trial comparisons suggest that receptive field borders are not shifted by the small eye movements occurring during attentive fixation. It is our hypothesis that attentive fixation engages a mechanism that gates incoming information to achieve a stabilization of the receptive field relative to the external world. Such a dynamic positional compensation may underlie preliminary evidence showing that the response of stereo-sensitive neurons in striate cortex is consistent with stimulus disparity measures and, within limits, does not reflect the retinal disparities produced by the changes in binocular alignment during fixation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205.
authors.forename: B C
authors.initials: BC
authors.lastname: Motter
authors.forename: G F
authors.initials: GF
authors.lastname: Poggio
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D008297:Male; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*