The Receptive Field Properties of a Depth-Selective Neural Population

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to examine depth integration beyond retinal topography in human vision. It is still unknown how extraretinal dimensions of a depth frame develop from low-level feature maps and whether depth-relevant afferents change visual representations in both of the early visual area and category-selective regions. Three experiments were conducted to explain what actually constitutes extraretinal axes in a depth-viewing condition, whether depth representation can be achieved in the primary visual cortex, and whether the TN and DV dimensions of receptive-field location make different contributions to depth representation and are dissociable in human cerebral cortex. In the present study, the axial development in the depth condition showed distinct developmental locales for the TN and DV retinal polarities, suggesting axial dissociation in human cerebral cortex. The findings on ipsilateral clusters provided evidence for the principle of translation-invariance on depth representation. In contrast, the findings on the DV dimension provided evidence for the principle of neural inverse projection primarily in the dorsal stream and category-selective visual regions