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Neuronal representation and attentional modulation of space and feature information in primate vision

Cheng Xue
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination: 2016-10-19
Date of issue: 2017-10-17
Advisor: Treue, Stefan Prof. Dr.
Referee: Treue, Stefan Prof. Dr.
Referee: Wolf, Fred Prof. Dr.

Persistent Address: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1735-0000-0023-3F35-2

 

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Abstract

English

Visual perception lays the groundwork for many activities of animals and human. Decades of neuroscience research in vision also revealed much knowledge about the general computational principles of the brain. My dissertation starts with a chapter of general review of the current literature on the neuronal basis of representation and advanced processing of visual information. Along the line of previous findings, I will present a series of studies, which I carried out or participated in, on human subjects and non-human primates that provided more insight to our current knowledge of the visual system. Chapter 2 revealed the independent representation of space and feature in macaque visual cortical area MST. Chapter 3 further showed distinct physiological effects of modulations on spatial and feature information in the same brain area. Chapter 4 demonstrated a profound link between human involuntary eye movement and attention allocation to a spatial location, which in another way provides a hypothesis why spatial information is uniquely processed. Chapter 5 investigated the similarity and difference between human and monkey visual systems, so that research findings from both species can be compared in a meaningful fashion. I end my dissertation with a final discussion of our findings and future outlooks. 
Keywords: area MST; attention; burstiness; microsaccade
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