Pattern and component responses of primate MT neurons recorded with multi-contact electrodes, stimulated with 1D and 2D noise patterns.

Direction selective neurons in primary visual cortex (area V1) are affected by the aperture problem, i.e., they are only sensitive to motion orthogonal to their preferred orientation. A solution to this problem first emerges in the middle temporal (MT) area, where a subset of neurons (called pattern cells) combine motion information across multiple orientations and directions, becoming sensitive to pattern motion direction. These cells are expected to play a prominent role in subsequent neural processing, but they are intermixed with cells that behave like V1 cells (component cells), and others that do not clearly fall in either group. The picture is further complicated by the finding that cells that behave like pattern cells with one type of pattern, might behave like component cells for another. We recorded from macaque MT neurons using multi-contact electrodes while presenting both type I and unikinetic plaids, in which the components were 1D noise patterns. We found that the indices that have been used in the past to classify neurons as pattern or component cells work poorly when the properties of the stimulus are not optimized for the cell being recorded, as is always the case with multi-contact arrays. We thus propose alternative measures, which considerably ameliorate the problem, and allow us to gain insights in the signals carried by individual MT neurons. We conclude that arranging cells along a component-to-pattern continuum is an oversimplification, and that the signals carried by individual cells only make sense when embodied in larger populations.