Orientation bandwidths of spatial mechanisms measured by masking

Orientation tuning curves were measured at 10 spatial frequencies ranging from 0.5 to 11.3 cycles per degree (cpd) using a masking paradigm. The stimuli were spatially localized test patterns of 1.0 octave bandwidth superimposed upon cosine grating masks. By using a model that corrects for the nonlinearity inherent in the masking process, we obtain the half-amplitude half-bandwidths (theta 1/2) of Cartesian-separable receptive fields that may underlie orientation selectivity. Additional experiments show that the data are not compatible with separability in polar coordinates (spatial frequency and orientation). The orientation half-bandwidths have been found to decrease somewhat with increasing spatial frequency, going from about 30 degrees at 0.5 cpd to 15 degrees at 11.3 cpd, for both sustained and transient forms of temporal modulation. Similar bandwidths are obtained from data where the test is oriented along 45 degrees. These bandwidth estimates are shown to be consistent with subthreshold summation data as well as physiological data from monkey striate cortex.