Neurons in the ventral intraparietal area of awake macaque monkey closely resemble neurons in the dorsal part of the medial superior temporal area in their responses to optic flow patterns

Abstract

1. Neurons in the ventral intraparietal area (VIP) are known to respond to translating random dot patterns. Such responses can be explained on the basis of the input of the middle temporal area (MT) to this area. Anatomic evidence has shown that VIP receives input from the dorsal part of the medial superior temporal area (MSTd) also. Neurons in the latter area are though to be involved in egomotion because they are sensitive to first-order optic flow components such as divergence and rotation. Because of their MT and MSTd input, neurons in VIP may be expected to show sensitivity to such first-order optic flow as well. 2. The question of whether VIP neurons are selective to translation and/or first-order optic flow was investigated quantitatively in two awake monkeys by recording the responses of 52 visually responsive units and by fitting their tuning curves. The responses after presentation of random dot patterns exhibiting either expansion, contraction, clockwise rotation, or anticlockwise rotation were compared with the responses to translation stimuli tested in eight directions. 3. Most VIP neurons showed clear direction-selective responses, particularly to expansion but sometimes also to a combination of components (spiral stimuli). 4. A typical feature of VIP neurons is that their responses to these optic flow components remain when different parts of the receptive field are stimulated separately (“scale invariance”). For the most responsive subfield the response was on average 93% of the whole field response. For all subfields the mean response was on average 64% of the whole field response. 5. To test whether the scale invariance arose from convergence of translation-sensitive subfields with radial or circular direction preferences (“mosaic hypothesis”), the direction selectivity for translating stimuli was tested over these subfields. Basically the direction selectivity for translation was unchanged in the various subfields, thereby excluding the direction mosaic hypothesis. 6. It is concluded that the receptive field characteristics of VIP are very similar to those of MSTd neurons.