Neuronal synchrony does not correlate with motion coherence in cortical area MT

Alexander Thiele and Gene Stoner ()
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Alexander Thiele: Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Gene Stoner: Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Nature, 2003, vol. 421, issue 6921, 366-370

Abstract: Abstract Natural visual scenes are cluttered with multiple objects whose individual features must somehow be selectively linked (or ‘bound’) if perception is to coincide with reality. Recent neurophysiological evidence1,2 supports a ‘binding-by-synchrony’ hypothesis3: neurons excited by features of the same object fire synchronously, while neurons excited by features of different objects do not. Moving plaid patterns offer a straightforward means to test this idea. By appropriate manipulations of apparent transparency, the component gratings of a plaid pattern can be seen as parts of a single coherently moving surface or as two non-coherently moving surfaces. We examined directional tuning and synchrony of area-MT neurons in awake, fixating primates in response to perceptually coherent and non-coherent plaid patterns. Here we show that directional tuning correlated highly with perceptual coherence, which is consistent with an earlier study4. Although we found stimulus-dependent synchrony, coherent plaids elicited significantly less synchrony than did non-coherent plaids. Our data therefore do not support the binding-by-synchrony hypothesis as applied to this class of motion stimuli in area MT.

Date: 2003
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DOI: 10.1038/nature01285

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