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

Nature volume 421, pages 366–370 (2003)Cite this article

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.

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Figure 1: Stimulus and monkey psychophysics.
Figure 2: Data from two neuronal pairs.
Figure 3: Synchrony magnitude firing rate and component-pattern indices cross-plotted for each pair-wise stimulus comparison.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Constanza and D. Diep for technical assistance. We also thank T. D. Albright, J. R. Reynolds, G. Boynton and J. Hegdé for discussions on this work and comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Alexander Thiele

    Present address: Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, UK

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  1. Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, 92037, USA

    Alexander Thiele & Gene Stoner

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Correspondence to Gene Stoner.

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Thiele, A., Stoner, G. Neuronal synchrony does not correlate with motion coherence in cortical area MT. Nature 421, 366–370 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01285

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