Morphological Identification of Simple, Complex and Hypercomplex Cells in the Visual Cortex of the Cat

The application of Procion yellow dye injection to the analysis of cells in the visual cortex is described, which allows questions of this type to be tackled in a number of preparations, including the retinas of the goldfish and turtle.

Abstract

The visual cortex of the brain has been intensively studied for many years, and as a consequence a large body of data concerning its anatomy and physiology is now available for a variety of species. The neurons in area 17 of the cat respond to bars or edges of light in such a way that Hubel and Wiesel (1962, 1965) were able to classify the receptive field of each cell as simple, complex, or hypercomplex. The study of Golgi impregnated material from this region indicates that, within a given layer, most cells are either stellate or pyramidal, as judged principally by the shapes of the cell somata and the patterns of dendritic arborization (Ramón y Cajal, 1922). Given this information, it is natural to ask whether the structural and functional properties of cells in the visual cortex are related in a consistent manner. The technique of Procion yellow dye injection (Stretton and Kravitz, 1968) has enabled questions of this type to be tackled in a number of preparations, including the retinas of the goldfish (Kaneko, 1970, and Chapter 11) and turtle (Baylor, Fuortes and O'Bryan, 1971; Hashimoto et al., Chapter 12). In the present report, we describe the application of this technique to the analysis of cells in the visual cortex.KeywordsVisual CortexReceptive FieldComplex CellSimple CellPial SurfaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.