Visual responses of inferior temporal neurons in awake rhesus monkey

We studied the responses to visual stimuli of neurons in area TE of the inferior temporal (IT) cortex in four awake monkeys (Macaca mulatta) trained to perform behavioral tasks. While the monkey looked at a fixation point in order to detect its dimming, another stimulus, such as a spot of light or a sine- or square-wave grating, usually produced only slight responses in inferior temporal neurons. However, the response to the stimulus was more vigorous if the task was changed so the fixation point blinked off before the stimulus came on while the monkey maintained its gaze. Responses to visual stimuli during this blink task were seen in 199 of 288 cells studied, and nearly all responded to a visual stimulus better during the blink task than during the task in which the fixation point remained on. Small spots of light usually produced consistent responses; we did not explore the response to complex stimuli or to objects. Latency of the visual response ranged from 70 to 220 ms. While the response of cells to a stimulus in the presence of the fixation point was limited to areas near the fovea, this apparently constricted visual receptive field expanded during the blink of the fixation point. In order to determine whether the increased response of the cell in the absence of the fixation point was due to a shift of attention from the fixation point to the visual stimulus, we required the monkey to respond to the dimming of this stimulus rather than to the dimming of the fixation point. We found that attention to the visual stimulus decreased the response of the cell during both the fixation and blink tasks. That is, the best response to the stimulus occurred in the blink task when attention to the stimulus was not required, while the poorest response occurred in the fixation task when attention to the stimulus was required. The reappearance of the fixation point during stimulus presentation in the blink task caused a transient time-locked suppression of response to the stimulus. This suggests that the reduction of response to the stimulus in the presence of the fixation point is caused by an interaction between the responses to the fixation point and the visual stimulus. To insure that we were recording from the same population of cells that had first been characterized by Gross, Rocha-Miranda, and Bender (14) in anesthetized, paralyzed monkeys, we recorded under those same conditions in two of our four monkeys.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)