RF remapping in V2: “Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted”

It is both fascinating and frustrating. Large-scale receptive field remapping in V2 neurons: Work by: Sachira Denagamage, Mitchell P Morton, Anirvan Nandy

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.01.539001v1

Our eyes are in constant motion, yet we perceive the visual world as being stable. Predictive remapping of receptive fields is thought to be one of the critical mechanisms for enforcing perceptual stability during eye movements. While receptive field remapping has been identified in several cortical areas, the spatiotemporal dynamics of remapping, and its consequences on the tuning properties of neurons, remain poorly understood. Here, we tracked remapping receptive fields in hundreds of neurons from visual Area V2 while subjects performed a cued saccade task. We found that remapping was far more widespread in Area V2 than previously reported and can be found in neurons from all recorded neural populations in the laminar cortical circuit. Surprisingly, neurons undergoing remapping exhibit sensitivity to two punctate locations in visual space. Remapping is also accompanied by a transient sharpening of orientation tuning. Taken together, these results shed light on the spatiotemporal dynamics of remapping and its ubiquitous prevalence in the early visual cortex, and force us to revise current models of perceptual stability.