Organisation and Interrelationships of Functional Maps in Cat and Monkey Striate Cortex

Optical imaging of intrinsic signals allows mapping of the cortical functional architecture in vivo at high spatial resolution. The ability to image activity patterns evoked by many different stimuli in the same piece of cortex can provide information on the spatial relationships between different functional maps. Our findings on the organisation of multiple functional maps in cat and monkey striate cortex are reviewed. The main focus is on the recent finding in cat of two subsystems differing in their response to spatiotemporal aspects of the stimulus.

We used grating stimuli of different spatial frequencies in an attempt to verify the existence of spatial frequency columns in cat area 17. Rather than observing a map of continuously changing spatial frequency across the cortical surface we found two distinct sets of domains, one preferring low and one preferring high spatial frequencies. By using different drift velocities we also found that the low-spatial-frequency domains preferred higher speeds than the high-spatial-frequency domains. Comparison of these spatiotemporal frequency domains with the cytochrome oxidase staining pattern revealed that the cytochrome oxidase blobs in cat striate cortex coincide with domains devoted to the processing of the low-spatial-frequency and high-temporal-frequency contents of the visual scene. Together with recent anatomical results these data suggest that spatiotemporal frequency domains are the manifestation of parallel streams in cat visual cortex with distinct patterns of thalamic inputs and extrastriate projections.

In the same experiments we also imaged the orientation preference and ocular dominance maps. We investigated the relationships between these three columnar systems, and compared them to an earlier study of orientation, ocular dominance, and blobs in macaque striate cortex. We found systematic relationships between the three systems. While some of these relationships were much weaker than those found in monkey, the organisational principles are similar.