Transient activity in monkey area MT represents speed changes and is correlated with human behavioral performance

Neurons in the middle temporal area (MT) respond to motion onsets and speed changes with a transient-sustained firing pattern. The latency of the transient response has recently been shown to correlate with reaction time in a speed change detection task, but it is not known how the sign, the amplitude, and the latency of this response depend on the sign and the magnitude of a speed change, and whether these transients can be decoded to explain speed change detection behavior. To investigate this issue, we measured the neuronal representation of a wide range of positive and negative speed changes in area MT of fixating macaques and obtained three major findings. First, speed change transients not only reflect a neuron's absolute speed tuning but are shaped by an additional gain that scales the tuned response according to the magnitude of a relative speed change. Second, by means of a threshold model positive and negative population transients of a moderate number of MT neurons explain detection of both positive and negative speed changes, respectively, at a level comparable to human detection rates under identical visual stimulation. Third, like reaction times in a psychophysical model of velocity detection, speed change response latencies follow a power-law function of the absolute difference of a speed change. Both this neuronal representation and its close correlation with behavioral measures of speed change detection suggest that neuronal transients in area MT facilitate the detection of rapid changes in visual input.