Population receptive fields in non-human primates from whole-brain fMRI and large-scale neurophysiology in visual cortex in visual cortex

  1. Peter Christiaan Klink  Is a corresponding author
  2. Xing Chen
  3. Vim Vanduffel
  4. Pieter Roelfsema
  1. Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Netherlands
  2. KU Leuven Medical School, Belgium

Abstract

Population receptive field (pRF) modeling is a popular fMRI method to map the retinotopic organization of the human brain. While fMRI-based pRF-maps are qualitatively similar to invasively recorded single-cell receptive fields in animals, it remains unclear what neuronal signal they represent. We addressed this question in awake non-human primates comparing whole-brain fMRI and large-scale neurophysiological recordings in areas V1 and V4 of the visual cortex. We examined the fits of several pRF-models based on the fMRI BOLD-signal, multi-unit spiking activity (MUA) and local field potential (LFP) power in different frequency bands. We found that pRFs derived from BOLD-fMRI were most similar to MUA-pRFs in V1 and V4, while pRFs based on LFP gamma power also gave a good approximation. FMRI-based pRFs thus reliably reflect neuronal receptive field properties in the primate brain. In addition to our results in V1 and V4, the whole-brain fMRI measurements revealed retinotopic tuning in many other cortical and subcortical areas with a consistent increase in pRF-size with increasing eccentricity, as well as a retinotopically specific deactivation of default-mode network nodes similar to previous observations in humans.

Data availability

- All data and code are available on GIN: https://doi.org/10.12751/g-node.p8ypgv- Unthresholded fMRI model fitting results are available on Neurovault: https://identifiers.org/neurovault.collection:8082

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Peter Christiaan Klink

    Vision and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    For correspondence
    c.klink@nin.knaw.nl
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6784-7842
  2. Xing Chen

    Vision and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3589-1750
  3. Vim Vanduffel

    KU Leuven Medical School, Leuven, Belgium
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Pieter Roelfsema

    Vision and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1625-0034

Funding

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (VENI 451.13.023)

  • Peter Christiaan Klink

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (STW-Perspectief P15-42 NESTOR"")

  • Xing Chen
  • Pieter Roelfsema

FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (ERC 339490 Cortic_al_gorithms"")

  • Pieter Roelfsema

Human Brain Project ((agreements 720270 and 785907,Human Brain Project SGA1 and SGA2"")

  • Vim Vanduffel
  • Pieter Roelfsema

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Crossover Program 17619 INTENSE"")

  • Peter Christiaan Klink
  • Pieter Roelfsema

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: Animal care and experimental procedures were in accordance with the ILAR's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, the European legislation (Directive 2010/63/EU) and approved by the institutional animal care and use committee of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Central Authority for Scientific Procedures on Animals (CCD) in the Netherlands (License numbers AVD8010020173789 and AVD8010020171046).

Copyright

© 2021, Klink et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Peter Christiaan Klink
  2. Xing Chen
  3. Vim Vanduffel
  4. Pieter Roelfsema
(2021)
Population receptive fields in non-human primates from whole-brain fMRI and large-scale neurophysiology in visual cortex in visual cortex
eLife 10:e67304.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67304

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https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67304

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