Neurons in visual areas of the brain are generally characterized by the increase in firing rate that occurs when a stimulus is flashed on in the receptive field (RF). However, neurons also increase their firing rate when a stimulus is turned off. These “termination responses” or “after-discharges” that occur with flashed stimuli have been observed in area V1 and they may be important for vision as stimulus terminations have been shown to influence visual perception. The goal of the present study was to determine the strength of termination responses in the more natural situation in which eye movements move a stimulus out of an RF. We find that termination responses do occur in macaque V1 when termination results from a saccadic eye movement, but they are smaller in amplitude compared to flashed-off stimuli. Furthermore, there are termination responses even in the absence of visual stimulation. These findings demonstrate that termination responses are a component of naturalistic vision. They appear to be based on both visual and nonvisual signals in visual cortex. We speculate that the weakening of termination responses might be a neural correlate of saccadic suppression, the loss of perceptual sensitivity around the time of saccades.

中文翻译：

---

猕猴 V1 中基于扫视的终止反应和视觉感知

大脑视觉区域中的神经元通常以在感受野 (RF) 中闪烁刺激时发生的放电率增加为特征。然而，当刺激被关闭时，神经元也会增加它们的放电率。已经在 V1 区域观察到随着闪光刺激发生的这些“终止反应”或“后放电”，它们可能对视觉很重要，因为刺激终止已被证明会影响视觉感知。本研究的目的是确定在更自然的情况下终止反应的强度，在这种情况下，眼球运动将刺激移出 RF。我们发现，当终止是由眼球运动引起时，终止反应确实发生在猕猴 V1 中，但与闪烁的刺激相比，它们的幅度较小。此外，即使在没有视觉刺激的情况下也会有终止反应。这些发现表明终止反应是自然主义视觉的一个组成部分。它们似乎基于视觉皮层中的视觉和非视觉信号。我们推测终止反应的减弱可能与扫视抑制的神经相关，即扫视时感知敏感性的丧失。