Responses of Primate Visual Cortical Neurons to Stimuli Presented by Flash, Saccade, Blink, and External Darkening

Our visual experience constitutes an unending chain of transient events, including those caused by saccadic eye movements, by blinks, and by localized or global changes in the external world. The categorical perception of objects is maintained across different classes of transient events, suggesting that the neural circuitry underlying visual perception responds to different transient events in a similar manner. However, different sorts of transients do have different perceptual impacts: for example, the sudden changes in a scene due to a saccade or a blink do not disturb our perceptual continuity of a visual scene as much as an external change does. We recorded the responses of 103 single visual cortical neurons in two rhesus monkeys (V1: n = 38, V2:n = 19, V3V/VP: n = 30, V4V:n = 16) to the onset and offset of a visual stimulus that was elicited by four different conditions: 1) stimulus flashed on and off while the eyes remain fixed; 2) stimulus turned on and off along with the entire scene (external da...