Visual response characteristics of neuronal clusters in the caudate nucleus of behaving cats

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Beside its motor functions, the caudate nucleus (CN), the main input structure of the basal ganglia, is also sensitive to various sensory modalities. The goal of our work was to investigate the effects of visual stimulation on the CN by using a behaving, head-restrained, eye movement-controlled feline model developed recently for this purpose in our laboratory. Extracellular multielectrode recordings were made from the CN in a visual fixation paradigm applying static and dynamic stimuli. The recorded neurons were classified in three groups according to their electrophysiological properties: phasically active (PAN), tonically active (TAN) and high-firing (HFN) neurons. The visual response characteristics were investigated according to this classification. The PAN and TAN neurons were sensitive primarily to static stimuli, while the HFN neurons responded primarily to changes in the visual environment i.e. to optic flow and the offset of the stimuli. The HFNs were the most sensitive to visual stimulation; their responses were stronger than those of the PANs and TANs. The majority of the recorded units were insensitive to the direction of the optic flow, regardless of group, but a small number of direction-sensitive neurons were also found. These demonstrate that both the static and the dynamic components of the visual information are represented in the CN. Furthermore, these results provide the first piece of evidence on optic flow processing in the CN, which, in more general terms, indicates the possible role of this structure in dynamic visual information processing.

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