The maximum range and timing of excitatory contextual modulation in monkey primary visual cortex

Abstract

Contextual modulations of receptive field properties by distal stimulus configurations have been shown for a variety of stimulus paradigms. A survey of excitatory contextual modulation data for V1 shows the maximum scale of interactions, measured in terms of distance in V1, to be between 10 mm and 30 mm. Different types of excitatory contextual modulation in V1 occur throughout the interval of 40–250 ms after stimulus delivery. This window provides opportunity for global propagation of visual contextual information to a subset of V1 neurons, via several routes within the visual system. We propose a number of experiments and analyses to confirm the results from this empirical survey.