Publications by authors named "Peter M Kaskan"

The neural bases of attention, a set of neural processes that promote behavioral selection, is a subject of intense investigation. In humans, rewarded cues influence attention, even when those cues are irrelevant to the current task. Because the amygdala plays a role in reward processing, and the activity of amygdala neurons has been linked to spatial attention, we reasoned that the amygdala may be essential for attending to rewarded images.

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Studies of the neural mechanisms underlying value-based decision making typically employ food or fluid rewards to motivate subjects to perform cognitive tasks. Rewards are often treated as interchangeable, but it is well known that the specific tastes of foods and fluids and the values associated with their taste sensations influence choices and contribute to overall levels of food consumption. Accordingly, we characterized the gustatory system in three macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and examined whether gustatory responses were modulated by preferences and hydration status.

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We have an incomplete picture of how the brain links object representations to reward value, and how this information is stored and later retrieved. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), medial frontal cortex (MFC), and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), together with the amygdala, are thought to play key roles in these processes. There is an apparent discrepancy, however, regarding frontal areas thought to encode value in macaque monkeys versus humans.

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Connections of primary (V1) and secondary (V2) visual areas were revealed in macaque monkeys ranging in age from 2 to 16 weeks by injecting small amounts of cholera toxin subunit B (CTB). Cortex was flattened and cut parallel to the surface to reveal injection sites, patterns of labeled cells, and patterns of cytochrome oxidase (CO) staining. Projections from the lateral geniculate nucleus and pulvinar to V1 were present at 4 weeks of age, as were pulvinar projections to thin and thick CO stripes in V2.

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Intrinsic-signal optical imaging was used to evaluate relationships of domains of neurons in middle temporal visual area (MT) selective for stimulus orientation and direction-of-motion. Maps of activation were elicited in MT of owl monkeys by gratings drifting back-and-forth, flashed stationary gratings and unidirectionally drifting fields of random dots. Drifting gratings, typically used to reveal orientation preference domains, contain a motion component that may be represented in MT.

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A significant concept in neuroscience is that sensory areas of the neocortex have evolved the remarkable ability to represent a number of stimulus features within the confines of a global map of the sensory periphery. Modularity, the term often used to describe the inhomogeneous nature of the neocortex, is without a doubt an important organizational principle of early sensory areas, such as the primary visual cortex (V1). Ocular dominance columns, one type of module in V1, are found in many primate species as well as in carnivores.

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Optical imaging was used to map patterns of visually evoked activation in the second (V2) and third (V3) visual areas of owl monkeys. Modular patterns of activation were produced in response to stimulation with oriented gratings, binocular versus monocular stimulation, and stimuli containing wide-field luminance changes. In V2, luminance-change domains tended to lie between domains selective for orientation.

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While considerable progress has been made in understanding the organization of visual cortex in monkeys, less is known about the visual systems of prosimians. The middle temporal visual area (MT), an area involved in motion perception, is common to all primates. We placed injections of tracers in MT and just caudal to MT in cortex expected to be the MT crescent (MTc), an area previously identified in monkeys but not in prosimians.

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Neural systems are necessarily the adaptive products of natural selection, but a neural system, dedicated to any particular function in a complex brain, may be composed of components that covary with functionally unrelated systems, owing to constraints beyond immediate functional requirements. Some studies support a modular or mosaic organization of the brain, whereas others emphasize coordination and covariation. To contrast these views, we have analysed the retina, striate cortex (V1) and extrastriate cortex (V2, V3, MT, etc.

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The middle temporal area (MT) is a visual area in primates with direct and indirect inputs from the primary visual cortex (V1), a role in visual motion perception, and a suggested role in "blindsight." When V1 is deactivated, some studies report continued activation of MT neurons, which has been attributed to an indirect pathway to MT from the superior colliculus. Here we used muscimol to deactivate V1 while optically imaging visually evoked activity in MT in two primates, owl monkeys and galagos, where MT is exposed on the brain surface.

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Optical imaging of intrinsic cortical responses to visual stimuli was used to characterize the organization of the middle temporal visual area (MT) of a prosimian primate, the bush baby (Otolemur garnetti). Stimulation with moving gratings revealed a patchwork of oval-like domains in MT. These orientation domains could, in turn, be subdivided into zones selective to directional movements that were mainly orthogonal to the preferred orientation.

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