Analysing visual receptive fields through generalised additive models with interactions

• Autores: María Xosé Rodríguez Álvarez, Carmen María Cadarso Suárez, Francisco Gonzalez Garcia
• Localización: Sort: Statistics and Operations Research Transactions, ISSN 1696-2281, Vol. 36, Nº. 1, 2012, págs. 3-44
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Visual receptive fields (RFs) are small areas of the visual field where a stimulus induces a re- sponses of a particular neuron from the visual system. RFs can be mapped using reverse cross- correlation technique, which produces raw matrices containing both spatial and temporal informa- tion about the RF. Though this technique is frequently used in electrophysiological experiments, it does not allow formal comparisons between RFs obtained under different experimental condi- tions. In this paper we propose the use of Generalised Additive Models (GAM) including com- plex interactions, to obtain smoothed spatio-temporal versions of RFs. Moreover, the proposed methodology also allow for the statistical comparisons of the RFs obtained across various experi- mental conditions. Data analysed here derive from studies of neurons� activity in the visual cortex of behaving monkeys. Our results suggest that the GAM-based technique proposed in this paper can be a flexible and powerful tool for assessing receptive field properties.