Many thousands of cortical neurons are activated by any single sensory stimulus, but the organization of these populations is poorly understood. For example, are neurons in mouse visual cortex--whose preferred orientations are arranged randomly--organized with respect to other response properties? Using high-speed in vivo two-photon calcium imaging, we characterized the receptive fields of up t...

The receptive-field positions and orientation preferences of neurons occupying the same tangential location in visual cortex are thought to be similar but to have an associated random scatter. However, previous estimates of this scatter may have been inflated by the use of subjective plotting methods, sequential recording of single units, and residual eye movements. Here we report measurements ...

Long-term changes in peripheral receptive field properties of mechanosensory/nociceptive neurons were investigated 1-3 weeks after noxious stimulation. Noxious stimuli consisted of a deep penetrating cut through the middle of the tail, strong electric shock applied to the tail surface, or a combination of deep and superficial tail stimulation. Action potentials evoked in the tail were monitored...

Receptive fields acquired through unsupervised learning of sparse representations of natural scenes have similar properties to primary visual cortex (V1) simple cell receptive fields. However, what drives in vivo development of receptive fields remains controversial. The strongest evidence for the importance of sensory experience in visual development comes from receptive field changes in anima...

We study characteristics of receptive fields of units in deep convolutional networks. The receptive field size is a crucial issue in many visual tasks, as the output must respond to large enough areas in the image to capture information about large objects. We introduce the notion of an effective receptive field, and show that it both has a Gaussian distribution and only occupies a fraction of ...

Primates normally make 2-3 saccadic eye movements/sec to explore the environment. To investigate how these eye movements might influence visual responses, we compared the dynamics of stimuli arriving on V1 complex cell receptive fields by switching stimuli in sequence while a monkey fixated to the responses occurring when the stimulus appears due to saccadic eye movements. During the image sequ...

Neural activity appears to be a crucial component for shaping the receptive fields of cortical simple cells into adjacent, oriented subregions alternately receiving ONand OFF-center excitatory geniculate inputs. It is known that the orientation selective responses of V1 neurons are refined by visual experience. After eye opening, the spatiotemporal structure of neural activity in the early stag...

The receptive fields of complex cells in the early visual cortex are economically modeled by combining outputs of a quadrature pair of linear filters. For actual complex cells, such a minimal model may be insufficient because many more simple cells are thought to make up a complex cell receptive field. To examine the minimalist model physiologically, we analyzed spatial relationships between th...