Abstract
Many neurons in the monkey visual extrastriate cortex have receptive fields that are affected by gaze direction. In humans, psychophysical studies suggest that motion signals may be encoded in a spatiotopic fashion. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to study spatial selectivity in the human middle temporal cortex (area MT or V5), an area that is clearly implicated in motion perception. The results show that the response of MT is modulated by gaze direction, generating a spatial selectivity based on screen rather than retinal coordinates. This area could be the neurophysiological substrate of the spatiotopic representation of motion signals.
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Acknowledgements
We thank A. Snyder and M. McAvoy of the Washington University Neuro-Imaging laboratory for making available the preprocessing and statistical analysis software and for continual technical assistance. The project was supported by the Italian Ministry for Research (Ministero Italiano della Università e Ricerca, Progetti di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale 2005), the European Commission Sixth Framework Program (New and Emerging Science and Technology grant 'MEMORY') and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC project grant 303133).
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d'Avossa, G., Tosetti, M., Crespi, S. et al. Spatiotopic selectivity of BOLD responses to visual motion in human area MT. Nat Neurosci 10, 249–255 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1824
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1824