Object-centered shifts of receptive field positions in monkey primary visual cortex

Stimuli that project the same retinal visual angle can appear to occupy very different proportions of the visual field if they are perceived to be at different distances [1-8]. Previous research shows that perceived angular size alters the spatial distribution of activity in early retinotopic visual cortex [7, 9-11]. For example, a sphere superimposed on the far end of a corridor scene appears to occupy a larger visual angle and activates a larger region of primary visual cortex (V1) compared with the same sphere superimposed on the near end of the corridor [7]. These previous results, however, were obtained from human subjects using psychophysics and fMRI, a fact that fundamentally limits our understanding of the underlying neuronal mechanisms. Here, we present an animal model that allows for a finer examination of size perception at the level of single neurons. We first show that macaque monkeys perceive a size-distance illusion similarly to humans. Then, using extracellular recordings, we test the specific hypothesis [12] that neurons in V1 shift the position of their receptive fields (RFs) in response to complex monocular depth cues. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that when ring-shaped stimuli appeared at the back of the corridor, RFs of V1 neurons shifted toward the center of the rings. When the same stimuli appeared at the front of the corridor, RFs shifted outward. Thus, our results show for the first time that V1 RFs can shift, potentially serving as the neural basis for the perception of angular size.