| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,780,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥180,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥780,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥180,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥3,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,000,000)
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| Research Abstract |
It has been reported that macaque monkeys with unilateral lesions in V1 exhibited analogous behavior to the human blindsight patients (Cowey and Stoerig, 1995). Here we examined behavioral report of visual awareness in monkeys with unilateral V1 lesions using saccade tasks and sought neural activity specific to blindsight. First, we examined whether the monkeys are able to maintain short-term memory of the stimuli presented in their contralateral (affected) hemifield. The monkeys were tested with a memory-guided saccade task with a 2 sec-delay. The success ratio was over 80%, significantly higher than chance. Then we recorded the neuronal activity from the superior colliculus (SC) during the memory-guided saccade task We found that a majority of the neurons recorded from the ipsilesional SC showed a delay activity selective for spatial locations of targets. On the other hand, the ratio of neurons with a delay activity was lower in the contralesional SC. These results suggest that the m
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onkeys with V1 lesion retain a certain level of visual awareness and that it was represented in the SC. Then we examined their visual awareness more directly using comparison between the performance of a forced-choke (FC) task., in which localization of target positions was required, and that of a yes-no (YN) task, in which detection of the targets was required. The performance of the FC task was better than that of the YN task when stimuli were presented in the affected hemifield. Such a dissociation &performance was not observed when stimuli with low luminance contrasts were presented in the ipsilateral ('normal') hemifield, indicating that the dissociation is specific to the V1 lesion, not a general phenomena occurring in near threshold vision. Then we examined whether the neural activity of SC during the YN task is dependent on the monkeys' report on visual awareness. We found that, in the ipsilesional SC, the neural response to the visual stimuli in the affected hemifield was larger when the monkeys successfully detect the targets than when the monkeys missed them. Such modulation was not found in the neural response to the near threshold stimuli in the normal hemifield when we recorded from the contralesional SC. These results suggest that the modulation of neural activity found in the ipsilesional SC is a neural correlate of reduced visual awareness that specifically induced by V1 lesion. Less
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