Resumen de Analysing visual receptive fields through generalised additive models with interactions
María Xosé Rodríguez Álvarez, Carmen María Cadarso Suárez, Francisco Gonzalez Garcia
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.
