This method is used to examine receptive fields of a more complex type and to make additional observations on binocular interaction and this approach is necessary in order to understand the behaviour of individual cells, but it fails to deal with the problem of the relationship of one cell to its neighbours.
The striate cortex was studied in lightly anaesthetized macaque and spider monkeys by recording extracellularly from single units and stimulating the retinas with spots or patterns of light, with response properties very similar to those previously described in the cat.
The present investigation, made in acute preparations, includes a study of receptive fields of cells in the cat's striate cortex, which resembled retinal ganglion-cell receptive fields, but the shape and arrangement of excitatory and inhibitory areas differed strikingly from the concentric pattern found in retinalganglion cells.
Kittens were visually deprived by suturing the lids of the right eye for various periods of time at different ages to study the effect of monocular eye closure on the number of cells that can be influenced by the previously closed eye.
The opponent principle, in which spatially separated excitatory and inhibitory regions are pitted against each other, has now been observed for retinal ganglion cells in the frog, the lizard, the rabbit, the rat, the ground squirrel, and the monkey.
To UNDERSTAND VISION in physiological terms represents a formidable problem for the biologist, and one approach is to stimulate the retina with patterns of light while recording from single cells or fibers at various points along the visual pathway.
The term hypercolumn is used to refer to a complete set of either type (180°, or left‐plus‐right eyes), with implications for the topographic mapping of visual fields onto cortex, and receptive‐field size and scatter.
Preliminary experiments suggest that the layer IVC columns in juvenile macaque monkeys are not fully developed until some weeks after birth, which explains the critical period for deprivation effects in the layerIV columns.