Cortical Magnification in Human Visual Cortex Parallels Task Performance around the Visual Field

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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Abstract

Human vision has striking radial asymmetries, with performance on many tasks varying sharply with stimulus polar angle. Performance is generally better on the horizontal than vertical meridian, and on the lower than upper vertical meridian, and these asymmetries decrease gradually with deviation from the vertical meridian. Here we report cortical magnification at a fine angular resolution around the visual field. This precision enables comparisons between cortical magnification and behavior, between cortical magnification and retinal cell densities, and between cortical magnification in twin pairs. We show that cortical magnification in human primary visual cortex, measured in 163 subjects, varies substantially around the visual field, with a pattern similar to behavior. These radial asymmetries in cortex are larger than those found in the retina, and they are correlated between monozygotic twin pairs. These findings indicate a tight link between cortical topography and behavior, and suggest that visual field asymmetries are partly heritable.

Data availability

All source code and data have been permanently archived on the Open Science Framework with DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/5GPRZ.

The following data sets were generated

1. Benson NC
2. Kupers ER
3. Barbot A
4. Carrasco M
5. Winawer J
(2020) Visual Performance Fields
Open Science Framework, doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/5GPRZ.

https://osf.io/5gprz/

The following previously published data sets were used

1. Benson NC et al.
(2018) The Human Connectome Project 7 Tesla Retinotopy Dataset
Open Science Framework, doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/BW9EC.

https://osf.io/bw9ec
1. Van Essen DC et al.
(2012) The Human Connectome Project Young Adult Dataset, 1200 Subject Release
Amazon S3, s3://hcp-openaccess/HCP_1200.

https://db.humanconnectome.org/
1. Curcio CA et al.
(1990) Human photoreceptor topography
Available as part of the ISETBIO toolbox.

https://github.com/isetbio/isetbio
1. Benson NC et al.
(2021) Variability of V1, V2, and V3 in a Large Sample of Human Observers
Open Science Framework, doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/GQNP8.

https://osf.io/gqnp8/

Article and author information

Author details

Noah C Benson

eScience Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, United States

For correspondence
nben@uw.edu

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2365-8265
Eline R Kupers

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4972-5307
Antoine Babot

Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Marisa Carrasco

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

Competing interests
Marisa Carrasco, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1002-9056
Jonathan Winawer

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7475-5586

Funding

National Eye Institute (RO1-EY027401)

Marisa Carrasco
Jonathan Winawer

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

Ethics

Human subjects: No human subjects data were collected for this paper. All data used in this paper were obtained from previous publications and publicly-available datasets in which subjects provided informed consent. Primarily, analyses were performed using data from the HCP (D. C. Van Essen et al. 2012, Neuroimage 62:2222-2231), including data from the HCP that were reanalyzed by subsequent studies (Benson et al. 2018, J Vis 18:23; Benson et al. 2021, bioRxiv 10.1101/2020.12.30.424856). Additionally, Figures 1 and 3 includes data replotted from previous publications by the authors (Carrasco et al. 2001, Spat Vis 15:61-75; Abrams et al. 2012, Vision Res 52:70-78; Barbot et al. 2021, J Vis 21:2), and Figure 5 includes publicly available data from Curcio et al. (1990, J Comp Neurol 292:497-523). In all cases, informed consent was obtained from subjects in the original studies, and all applicable use policies were followed in the use of the data. No personal health information is included in this paper or in the associated dataset or code.

Copyright

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.