Linking V1 Activity to Behavior

Eyal Seidemann, Wilson S. Geisler
2018 Annual Review of Vision Science  
A long-term goal of visual neuroscience is to develop and test quantitative models that account for the moment-by-moment relationship between neural responses in early visual cortex and human performance in natural visual tasks. This review focuses on efforts to address this goal by measuring and perturbing the activity of primary visual cortex (V1) neurons while non-human primates perform demanding, well-controlled visual tasks. We start by describing a conceptual approach-the decoder linking
more » ... odel (DLM) framework-in which candidate decoding models take neural responses as input and generate predicted behavior as output. The ultimate goal in this framework is to find the actual decoder-the model that best predicts behavior from neural responses. We discuss key relevant properties of primate V1 and review current literature from the DLM perspective. We conclude by discussing major technological and theoretical advances that are likely to accelerate our understanding of the link between V1 activity and behavior. An important property of the connections between the successive stages in the processing hierarchy is that each neuron at a given stage receives converging local input from the earlier stage such that the receptive fields of neurons in the recipient area cover a greater fraction of Seidemann and Geisler
doi:10.1146/annurev-vision-102016-061324 pmid:29975592 pmcid:PMC6141357 fatcat:cfsv5tanhne7nmee5uyehh7w2y