Rosa Laufer-Sosa, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, UW-Madison
Member of the McPherson Eye Research Institute
Causal Role of V4 Functional Organization in Perception
Much is known about what visual cortical neurons respond to, but far less is known about what their activity causally contributes to perception. I will describe recent experiments using behavioral optogenetics in macaque area V4 to address this question. Monkeys reliably detect focal optogenetic perturbations of V4, and their ability to do so depends on the visual image being viewed at the time of stimulation. Unlike in inferotemporal cortex, however, weakening concurrent visual input does not impair detection and can enhance it, suggesting that V4 stimulation adds a visual event to ongoing perception. Intriguingly, nearby V4 sites produce distinct, feature-dependent perceptual effects. I will discuss how these findings motivate a new approach combining functional imaging with behavioral optogenetics to ask whether the known functional organization of visual cortex predicts the perceptual consequences of causally perturbing it.