Neural Sensitivity to Radial Frequency Patterns in the Visual Cortex of Developing Macaques

Abstract

Visual resolution, contrast sensitivity, and form perception improve gradually with age. In nonhuman primates, the sensitivity and resolution of cells in the retina, lateral geniculate nucleus, and primary visual cortex (V1) also improve, but not enough to account for the perceptual changes. So, what aspects of visual system development limit visual sensitivity in infants? Improvements in behavioral sensitivity might arise from maturation of regions downstream of V1 such as V2, V4, and IT, which are thought to support increasingly complex perceptual abilities. We recorded the responses of populations of neurons in areas V1, V2, V4, and PIT to radial frequency patterns—a type of global form stimulus. Subjects were three young monkeys (two female, one male) between the ages of 19 and 54 weeks and a single adult animal (male). We found that neurons and neural populations in V4 reliably encoded global form in radial frequency stimuli at the earliest ages we studied, while V1 neurons do not. V2 and PIT populations also showed some degree of selectivity for these patterns at early ages, especially at higher radial frequency values. We did not find significant, systematic changes in neural decoding performance that could account for the improvement in behavioral performance over the same age range in an overlapping group of animals (Rodriguez Deliz et al., 2024). Finally, consistent with our prior behavioral results, neural populations in V4 show highest sensitivity for the higher radial frequency values, which contain the highest concentration of curvature and orientation cues.