Spatiotopic Adaptation in Visual Areas

The ability to perceive the visual world around us as spatially stable despite frequent eye movements is one of the long-standing mysteries of neuroscience. The existence of neural mechanisms processing spatiotopic information is indispensable for a successful interaction with the external world. However, how the brain handles spatiotopic information remains a matter of debate. We here combined behavioral and fMRI adaptation to investigate the coding of spatiotopic information in the human brain. Subjects were adapted by a prolonged presentation of a tilted grating. Thereafter, they performed a saccade followed by the brief presentation of a probe. This procedure allowed dissociating adaptation aftereffects at retinal and spatiotopic positions. We found significant behavioral and functional adaptation in both retinal and spatiotopic positions, indicating information transfer into a spatiotopic coordinate system. The brain regions involved were located in ventral visual areas V3, V4, and VO. Our findings suggest that spatiotopic representations involved in maintaining visual stability are constructed by dynamically remapping visual feature information between retinotopic regions within early visual areas.

Why do we perceive the visual world as stable, although we constantly perform saccadic eye movements? We investigated how the visual system codes object locations in spatiotopic (i.e., external world) coordinates. We combined visual adaptation, in which the prolonged exposure to a specific visual feature alters perception, with fMRI adaptation, where the repeated presentation of a stimulus leads to a reduction in the BOLD amplitude. Functionally, adaptation was found in visual areas representing the retinal location of an adaptor but also at representations corresponding to its spatiotopic position. The results suggest that an active dynamic shift transports information in visual cortex to counteract the retinal displacement associated with saccade eye movements.