MATLAB/OCTAVE TOOLS FOR THE VISUAL NEUROSCIENCE CLASS II: UNDERSTANDING THE EXCITATION PATTERNS IN V1 AND MT AREAS

A problem in teaching Visual Neuroscience is that students with biomedicine background are still unaware of the advantages of quantitative thinking and usually get stuck with maths. As a result, they have troubles with current experimental techniques and neural models heavily based on signal and information processing concepts. In this series of papers devoted to the Visual Neuroscience classroom, we present a number of computational tools to help the students to learn-by-playing, as opposed to the classical analytical approach in physical sciences. In this work, we present tools to understand the response of V1 and MT cells to complex moving sequences. By visualizing the spectrum of natural movies and the receptive fields of the cells in the frequency domain, students understand the dynamic of the excitation-inhibition patterns in V1 and MT areas.