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Rogelio Perez

Publications and source records attributed to Rogelio Perez.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Temporal characteristics of visual receptive fields in primary visual cortex and medial superior temporal cortex areas.

We mapped the receptive fields of 49 cells from primary visual cortex and 19 cells from medial superior temporal cortex in two awake monkeys. The receptive field structures we obtained lasted a mean time of 32.7 ms in primary visual cortex and 38.4 ms in medial superior temporal cortex, showing no statistical difference. This result suggests that both areas have the same time requirements for processing visual information. In primary visual cortex, 100% of cells had conformed the receptive field structure at 65 ms pre-spike, whereas in medial superior temporal cortex it occurred at 150 ms. In both areas, cells with shorter response latencies had receptive field structures with longer durations. This may indicate that cells tend to synchronize their output to other areas.

Action Potentials↗

Retinal correspondence of monocular receptive fields in disparity-sensitive complex cells from area V1 in the awake monkey.

PURPOSE: To explore the neural mechanisms underlying disparity sensitivity in complex cells of the macaque visual cortex, the relationship between interocular receptive field (RF) positional shift and disparity sensitivity was studied in area V1. METHODS: Single-unit recordings were made from area V1 of awake Macaca mulatta. Monocular RFs were mapped by means of a reverse cross-correlation technique, and their centers were determined after performing a bidimensional Gaussian function fitting. Interocular RF shifts were calculated for both bright and dark stimuli. Similarly, Gabor adjustments were obtained from disparity profiles to bright and dark dynamic random-dot stereograms (RDSs). RESULTS: Twenty-five complex cells were studied. The response profiles to disparity were similar for bright and dark RDSs. Interocular RF positional shift correlated significantly with both the peaks of Gabor fittings of disparity-sensitivity profiles and the peaks of the Gaussian envelopes of these Gabor fittings. Correlation between interocular RF positional shift and the peaks of the Gaussian envelopes was stronger than correlation between interocular RF positional shift and peaks of Gabor fittings. CONCLUSIONS: Interocular shift of monocular RFs is more related to the center of the range of disparities to which the cell is sensitive, than to the preferred disparity of the cell.

Animals↗

Binocular interaction and performance of visual tasks.

Binocular vision implies the fusion of the right and left retinal images to perceive a single image. For this, interocular interaction is required. We measured the reaction times to carry out a visual fixation task in order to determine whether binocular interaction influences performance. Several combinations of test and distraction stimuli were monocularly and binocularly presented to one monkey and three human subjects. The overall median reaction times were 340 ms for the animal and 308, 342 and 381 for human subjects 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Reaction time was shorter when the test stimulus was presented binocularly. Moreover, we observed that the presence of a distraction stimulus increased the reaction time and that a correlated distraction stimulus had a greater influence on this increase than an uncorrelated distraction stimulus. These findings indicate that with binocular vision a more rapid performance of a visual task occurs.

Adult↗

Sensitivity to horizontal and vertical disparity and orientation preference in areas V1 and V2 of the monkey.

It has been suggested that cells are most sensitive to disparities along the axis orthogonal to their orientation preference. To test this assumption we studied the orientation preference of 73 cells sensitive to retinal disparity, 44 from V1 and 29 from V2. Orientation preference and disparity sensitivity were not related in tuned excitatory and tuned inhibitory cells. We found 18 near/far cells with orientation preference. Of these, 10 (56%) had a preferred orientation less than 30% away from the orthogonal to the disparity axis whereas the remaining eight cells (44%) exceeded this value. Our data suggests that the neural mechanisms for encoding retinal disparities present in dynamic random dot stereograms may not be related to the preferred orientation of the cell.

Animals↗