Visual discrimination of discontinuous figures in the rabbit

Rabbits were trained to discriminate between vertical and horizontal striations. After the 90% correct level had been reached transfer to vertical and horizontal rows of dots was studied. It was found that performance depended on the distance between adjacent dots. With angular dot separations (measured from the centers) larger than 4.9 degrees, performance was below the 75% correct level. This result is discussed in relation to the size of the receptive fields of orientation-selective neurons in the binocular visual cortex.