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How MT cells analyze the motion of visual patterns

Nature Neuroscience volume 9, pages 1421–1431 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

Neurons in area MT (V5) are selective for the direction of visual motion. In addition, many are selective for the motion of complex patterns independent of the orientation of their components, a behavior not seen in earlier visual areas. We show that the responses of MT cells can be captured by a linear-nonlinear model that operates not on the visual stimulus, but on the afferent responses of a population of nonlinear V1 cells. We fit this cascade model to responses of individual MT neurons and show that it robustly predicts the separately measured responses to gratings and plaids. The model captures the full range of pattern motion selectivity found in MT. Cells that signal pattern motion are distinguished by having convergent excitatory input from V1 cells with a wide range of preferred directions, strong motion opponent suppression and a tuned normalization that may reflect suppressive input from the surround of V1 cells.

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Figure 1: Component and pattern MT cell responses to plaid stimuli.
Figure 2: Quantification of neuronal responses to plaids.
Figure 3: The cascade model and its characterization.
Figure 4: Comparison of actual and model-predicted responses to plaids for five example cells.
Figure 5: Comparison of the pattern index observed and predicted by the cascade model.
Figure 6: Recovered models for five example MT neurons, corresponding to the same cells whose data are shown in Figure 4.
Figure 7: Relationship between the recovered cascade model parameters and pattern index.
Figure 8: Dissection of the elements of the cascade model that create particular kinds of selectivity for the motion of plaids.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to M. Carandini and N. Majaj for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through an Investigatorship to E.P.S. and by a grant from the National Eye Institute to J.A.M. (EY02017). V.M. was supported by a grant to M. Carandini from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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Author notes

  1. Nicole C Rust

    Present address: McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, USA

  2. Valerio Mante

    Present address: Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

  3. Eero P Simoncelli and J Anthony Movshon: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Nicole C Rust & Eero P Simoncelli

  2. Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Nicole C Rust, Valerio Mante, Eero P Simoncelli & J Anthony Movshon

  3. Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich, and Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, CH-8057, Switzerland

    Valerio Mante

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Correspondence to Nicole C Rust.

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Rust, N., Mante, V., Simoncelli, E. et al. How MT cells analyze the motion of visual patterns. Nat Neurosci 9, 1421–1431 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1786

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