Vernier acuity of neurones in cat visual cortex

Abstract

The ability of human observers to detect Vernier breaks of as little as 5s of arc has been termed hyperacuity¹ as this distance is substantially less than the angular separation of the bars of the highest spatial frequency of grating (˜1 arc min) that can be detected. Although the visual cortex is a likely candidate for the location of detectors involved in this performance², it is not known whether there are cells sensitive enough to detect deviations from co-linearity that are small compared with their spatial resolution (defined in terms of the highest spatial frequency that the cell can detect). We report here the results of physiological experiments on single units in area 17 of the cat visual cortex in which we studied the effect of introducing a Vernier break into a bar stimulus moved across the receptive field of the cell at a constant velocity. Our results show that the responses of most simple and complex cells are significantly reduced by the introduction of a Vernier break that is substantially smaller than the spatial resolution of the cell. The most sensitive cells in our sample could discriminate Vernier offsets of 3–6 arc min with a reliability of ˜70%. This was much smaller than their spatial resolution, which was in the range 25–30 arc min. We interpret these results in terms of mechanisms that could underly the orientation selectivity of cortical neurones and suggest how our results relate to human Vernier acuity.