Simple cells in cat striate cortex: responses to stationary flashing and to moving light bars

Cells in the simple family respond to a moving light bar with an average response histogram that is most commonly unimodal (single peak: encounter frequency, 64%) and less commonly bimodal (33%) or trimodal (3%). The mean width of the principal response peak given by hypercomplex I cells is narrower than that of simple cells and they have a lower mean optimal stimulus velocity. In a series of 74 cells (simple, 47; hypercomplex I, 27), detailed comparison of the spatial relations between the response peaks to the moving bar and the subregions to the stationary flashing bar led to the concept of a boundary response. The term "boundary response" refers to an isolated response peak occurring as a moving light bar leaves an OFF subregion that is the last in the sequence of subregions traversed by the bar. The presence of a boundary response leads to an apparent discrepancy between the number of response peaks to a moving light bar and the number of ON subregions in the static-field plot. The boundary response is necessarily completely direction selective. A detailed comparison of the properties of cells as revealed by hand and quantitative methods showed a very good agreement between the two methods in respect to the assignment of cells to the simple, B- and complex cell families. There were, however, serious discrepancies in respect to the receptive field organization of cells in the simple family.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)