The total excitatory input integrated over an oriented stimulus that moves across the receptive field will be nearly identical at all orientations,

because the geniculate inputs respond identically at each stimulus orientation. What varies instead is their relative timing, which will be nearly simultaneous for the preferred orientation but spread out in time for the nonpreferred orientations (Figure 1B). Even for nonpreferred stimuli, however, the total excitatory input is nonzero. A threshold is therefore required to render the spike output of the cell perfectly orientation selective, with this website no response at the orthogonal orientation (Figure 1B, bottom). One feature of simple cells that surely prompted Hubel and Wiesel to propose the feedforward model is the similarity between the ON and OFF subfields of simple cells and the ON and OFF centers and surrounds of geniculate relay cells. That ON subfields of simple cells are in fact driven from input from ON-center LGN relay cells (and OFF from OFF) was demonstrated convincingly by spike-triggered averaging of the spike responses of a simple cell from a simultaneously recorded LGN cell (Tanaka, 1983). If an excitatory connection is detected, the receptive field center of the presynaptic selleck inhibitor LGN cell almost invariably overlaps a subfield in the simple cell of the same polarity (Figure 1C), and the

stronger the connection, the more closely aligned the receptive fields (Reid and Alonso, 1995). Further confirmation of the feedforward model comes from experiments showing that the LGN relay cell axons that project into a cortical orientation column—recorded while the cortical neurons are silenced pharmacologically—have their receptive fields aligned parallel to the preferred

orientation of nearby cells recorded prior to silencing (Figure 1D) (Chapman et al., 1991). Third, the summed receptive fields of a group of LGN cells projecting to a single orientation column—identified by spike-triggered averaging of cortical field potentials—form a simple-like receptive field aligned with the column’s preferred orientation (Jin et al., 2011). While there is little disagreement that a simple cell’s preferred orientation is laid out by its geniculate input, less certain Calpain is whether feedforward input is sufficient to explain all of a simple cell’s behavior, or whether additional circuit elements and mechanisms are required. Hints supporting the latter interpretation started to emerge soon after the 1962 paper. Hubel and Wiesel had made their observations delivering visual stimuli by hand and judging neuronal responses by ear. The subsequent introduction of methods for precise stimulus delivery and response measurement made possible a more quantitative description of simple cell response properties.

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