Laboratory

in sensory physiology

In the primate visual cortex, neurons signal differences in the appearance of objects with high precision. However, not all activated neurons contribute directly to perception. We defined the perceptual pool in extrastriate visual area V5/MT for a stereo-motion task, based on trial-by-trial co-variation between perceptual decisions and neuronal firing. We manipulated the activity of single neurons trial-to-trial by introducing task-irrelevant stimulus changes. For individual neurons, the correlation between perceptual choice and neuronal activity may be fundamentally different when responding to different versions of the same stimulus in the same location. Therefore, neuronal pools supporting sensory discrimination must be structured flexibly and independently for each stimulus configuration to be discriminated. Krug et al 2016 is part of the themed Phil Trans B issue 'Vision in our three-dimensional world'.