TEMPORAL PRECISION OF SPIKE TRAINS IN EXTRASTRIATE CORTEX OF THE BEHAVING MACAQUE MONKEY

How reliably do action potentials in cortical neurons encode informati on about a visual stimulus? Most physiological studies do not weigh th e occurrences of particular action potentials as significant but treat them only as reflections of average neuronal excitation. We report th at single neurons recorded in a previous study by Newsome et al. (1989 ; see also Britten et al. 1992) from cortical area MT in the behaving monkey respond to dynamic and unpredictable motion stimuli with a mark edly reproducible temporal modulation that is precise to a few millise conds. This temporal modulation is stimulus dependent, being present f or highly dynamic random motion but absent when the stimulus translate s rigidly.