Tuning Curves for Movement Direction in the Human Visuomotor System

Tuning curves for movement direction in the human visuomotor system.

Neurons in macaque primary motor cortex (M1) are broadly tuned to arm movement direction. Recent evidence suggests that human M1 contains directionally tuned neurons, but it is unclear which other areas are part of the network coding movement direction and what characterizes the responses of neuronal populations in those areas. Such information would be highly relevant for the implementation of...

Directional Tuning Curves, Elementary Movement Detectors, and the Estimation of the Direction of Visual Movement

Directional tuning curves, elementary movement detectors, and the estimation of the direction of visual movement.

Both the insect brain and the vertebrate retina detect visual movement with neurons having broad, cosine-shaped directional tuning curves oriented in either of two perpendicular directions. This article shows that this arrangement can lead to isotropic estimates of the direction of movement: for any direction the estimate is unbiased (no systematic errors) and equally accurate (constant random ...

University of Groningen Directional Tuning Curves, Elementary Movement Detectors, and the Estimation of the Direction of Visual Movement

A Bayesian approach for characterizing direction tuning curves

22 Neural responses are commonly studied in terms of “tuning curves”, characterizing changes in neuronal 23 response as a function of a continuous stimulus parameter. In the motor system, neural responses to 24 movement-direction often follow a bell-shaped tuning curve, whose exact shape determines the properties of 25 neuronal movement coding. Estimating the shape of that tuning curve robustly...