Visual and Nonvisual Contributions to Three-Dimensional Heading Selectivity in the Medial Superior Temporal Area

By Yong Gu, Paul V. Watkins, Dora E. Angelaki, Gregory C. DeAngelis. Journal of Neuroscience, 2006

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Robust perception of self-motion requires integration of visual motion signals with nonvisual cues. Neurons in the dorsal subdivision of the medial superior temporal area (MSTd) may be involved in this sensory integration, because they respond selectively to global patterns of optic flow, as well as translational motion in darkness. Using a virtual-reality system, we have characterized the three-dimensional (3D) tuning of MSTd neurons to heading directions defined by optic flow alone, inertial motion alone, and congruent combinations of the two cues. Among 255 MSTd neurons, 98% exhibited significant 3D heading tuning in response to optic flow, whereas 64% were selective for heading defined by inertial motion. Heading preferences for visual and inertial motion could be aligned but were just as frequently opposite. Moreover, heading selectivity in response to congruent visual/vestibular stimulation was typically weaker than that obtained using optic flow alone, and heading preferences under congruent stimulation were dominated by the visual input. Thus, MSTd neurons generally did not integrate visual and nonvisual cues to achieve better heading selectivity. A simple two-layer neural network, which received eye-centered visual inputs and head-centered vestibular inputs, reproduced the major features of the MSTd data. The network was trained to compute heading in a head-centered reference frame under all stimulus conditions, such that it performed a selective reference-frame transformation of visual, but not vestibular, signals. The similarity between network hidden units and MSTd neurons suggests that MSTd may be an early stage of sensory convergence involved in transforming optic flow information into a (head-centered) reference frame that facilitates integration with vestibular signals.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology, Ophthalmology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e797e2391daae9f61bdc9819a48687807b1d64f7

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Dora E. Angelaki

Citations in the corpus

Vestibular system: the many facets of a multimodal sense. (2008, unknown): “First, reference frames for visual and vestibular heading signals in MSTd remain distinct, although evidence clearly shows that these neurons might mediate multisensory cue integration (Gu et al. 2006b).”
Deep Hierarchies in the Primate Visual Cortex: What Can We Learn for Computer Vision? (2013, background): “Furthermore, several other cortical areas in the monkey have an identified homologue in the human (e.g., MT/MST, Anterior Intraparietal Area (AIP)).”
A Normalization Model of Multisensory Integration (2011, unknown): “In area MSTd, many neurons have heading tuning that is not matched for visual and vestibular inputs 13 .”
Multisensory integration in macaque visual cortex depends on cue reliability (2008, methodology): “First, what is the combination rule used by neurons to integrate sensory signals from two different sources? Second, how does this rule depend on the relative reliabilities of the sensory cues? We addressed these issues by examining visual-vestibular interactions in the dorsal portion of the medial ”