Axis of preferred motion is a function of bar length in visual cortical receptive fields

The responses of 82 simple cells and 41 complex cells in area 17 of anesthetized and paralysed cats were examined with light bars of different length. For 84% of the simple cells and 66% of the complex cells the preferred axis of orientation of a stationary flashing long bar (orientational selectivity) and the preferred axis of movement of a small spot were parallel. As a consequence, the axis of maximal response to a moving light spot was mostly orthogonal to the optimal axis of a moving bar. Thus, a single cell responds to two perpendicular axes of preferred movement one for a long bar and one for a light spot, respectively. For both axes independent direction preferences could be distinguished. Additional preferred axes of movement between the two orthogonal extremes could be found with moving bars of intermediate lengths. This can be explained by the fact that cells with a pronounced response to a moving spot showed a strong tendency for intermediate bar length to elicit responses consisting of a superposition of both components. Therefore, decreasing bar length resulted in a gradual rotation of the preferred direction of movement from orthogonal to parallel with respect to the orientational axis, rather than to a mere widening of the tuning curve. Accordingly, the change in orientation selectivity with decreasing bar length is a regular transition from the orientation dependent response to a response type that depends only on the movement axis of the spot. Thus, in a simple model, the resulting response characteristic can be interpreted as an average of both components weighted according to the length of the stimulus.