MODULATORY INFLUENCES FROM THE RECEPTIVE FIELD SURROUNDING ON NEURONAL ACTIVITY IN CORTICAL EXTRASTRIATE AREA 21A.

The neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the central processing of incoming visual information is still a fundamental problem in the visual neuroscience. The response patterns of visually sensitive neurons in extrastriate area 21a of the cat cortex to the stationary and moving visual stimuli were studied in detail. The results of experiments show significant modulations of neuronal response patterns at the introduction of a moving visual stimulus, which could not be explained by the neuron receptive field (RF) stationary structure. The results of presented experiments have shown that neurons having homogenous stationary RFs structure may reveal multimodal patterns of responses to moving visual stimuli and such response profiles could be evoked from the isolated RF subfields too. Thus, with great probability, mutual interactions among simultaneously activated neighbouring neuron networks become to be of great importance in central processing of visual information, concerning the precise diversification and perception of visual images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]