Adaptation of the temporal receptive fields of macaque V1 neurons

Traditional view of macaque V1 neurons is that they are static spatiotemporal filters. This study shows that V1 neurons’ temporal receptive fields (kernels) are dynamic and adaptive. In order to study the adaptation of the kernels to a variety of stimuli, we developed a regression approach to recover kernels using naturalistic stimuli. Using this technique, we studied how the kernels of the V1 neurons in macaque monkeys adapt to the frequency bandwidth of naturalistic signals. We found that the temporal frequency tunings and the gains of the receptive fields of the neurons change according to the statistical context of the stimulus environment.