ORIENTATION SENSITIVE PROPERTIES AND RECEPTIVE FIELD SPATIAL ALTERATIONS OF VISUALLY SENSITIVE NEURONS IN AREA 21A OF THE CAT CORTEX.

Orientation sensitive properties of extrastriate area 21a neurons were investigated. Special attention was paid to the spatial characteristics of the neuron receptive fields (RF) to the different orientations of visual stimulus motion across neuron RF, defined by presentation of stationary visual stimuli. The results of provided experiments have shown that the neuron RF spatial dimensions undergo essential modulations concerning different orientations of applied visual stimuli. As a result, a high degree of diversification of neuronal response patterns depending of the orientation of moving stimuli was observed. Thus, the processing of visual information in the course of visual image recognition is realized by integrated activity of surrounding cortical networks of visually sensitive neurons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]