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A sense of direction

Nature volume 392, pages 433–434 (1998)Cite this article

In order to sense visual motion, the brain must determine not only where an object is, but where it was a few moments ago. To do so, the brain may depend in part on a small number of curiously shaped neurons deep in the visual cortex.

Now consider a bar approaching the receptive field from the left (Fig. 2, upper right). The bar first triggers the EPSP, which in turn evokes action potentials in the cell. Later, the bar moves on to the inhibitory region of the receptive field, but the resulting IPSP is too late to prevent the EPSP from evoking action potentials. A bar approaching from the right, however, has a very different effect (Fig. 2, lower right). If the velocity is in the right range, the bar will encounter the right side of the receptive field about 25 ms before it reaches the left side. The time it takes the stimulus to cross the receptive field allows the IPSP time to reach its peak just as the EPSP does. The IPSP can therefore prevent the EPSP from generating action potentials, and the cell fails to respond to leftward motion of the stimulus.

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Figure 1: A drawing by Cajal1 of neurons from the human cerebral cortex.
Figure 2: The possible organization of a direction-selective cell.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208, Illinois, USA

    David Ferster

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  1. David Ferster
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Ferster, D. A sense of direction. Nature 392, 433–434 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/33005

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