认知的神经基础研究组
2008
  • 题目:Single Units reflect Awareness in the Macaque Prefrontal Cortex
  • 作者:T. Panagiotaropoulos; V. Kapoor; G. Keliris; A. S. Tolias; N. K. Logothetis
  • 刊物名称:AREADNE 2008. Research in Encoding and Decoding of Neural Ensembles
  • 发表年度:2008
  • DOI:
摘要
Binocular rivalry has been combined successfully with single unit recordings in awake, behaving macaques to study the mechanisms of subjective visual perception. These studies find that a small percentage of neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) are correlated with the animal’s subjective percept. A much higher percentage of neurons are tuned to the perceived stimuli in visual areas higher up in the hierarchy (around 40% in areas V4, V5/MT and ~90% in the inferior temporal cortex (IT)). However, the role of neurons in prefrontal cortical areas in subjective perception remains largely unknown. In this study we used binocular flash suppression (BFS) to explore the neuronal correlates of visual awareness in the macaque PFC and specifically in the inferior prefrontal convexity. BFS is a visual stimulation paradigm closely related to binocular rivalry which permits the robust induction of a visual percept under dissimilar visual input conditions. We found that the firing rate of almost 70% of the visually selective neurons closely followed the induced visual percept. The vast majority (95%) of the perceptually modulated neurons fired more when their preferred stimulus was perceptually dominant. Only a tiny fraction of these neurons fired more when the p