Neurons in parafoveal areas V1 and V2 encode vertical and horizontal disparities

Stereoscopic vision mainly relies on binocular horizontal disparity (HD), and its cortical encoding is well established in the foveal representation of the visual field. The role of vertical disparity (VD) is more controversial. Thus far, in the monkey, very few studies have investigated the HD sensitivity beyond 5 degrees of retinal eccentricity and no evidence of a real encoding of VD exists in the parafoveal representation of areas V1 and V2. Using dynamic random dot stereograms, we have tested both HD and VD selectivities in the parafoveal representation of V1 (calcarine V1) and V2 (eccentricities > 10 degrees ) in a behaving monkey. HD and VD selectivities have been characterized using fitting with Gabor function. A large proportion of the tested cells were both HD and VD selective (47%) and, to a lesser extent, HD selective only (8%) or VD selective only (23%). We found a real encoding of VD, with the same diversity in the tuning profiles as described for HD, that cannot be assimilated to a simple perturbation of the HD matching process. Moreover, the VD encoding had a finer scale than the HD one, which is coherent with the smaller range of naturally occurring VD. For the HD encoding, both the percentage of selective cells and the tuning parameters were close to those reported in foveal V1. These results show that, at parafoveal eccentricities in V1 and V2, disparity detectors are tuned to both horizontal and vertical dimensions of the positional disparity existing between matched features in both retinas.