Submitted on May 22, 2007
Accepted on May 23, 2007
Studying the visual system in awake monkeys: two classic papers by Robert H. Wurtz
Michael E. Goldberg1*
1 Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Unit 87, New York, New York, 10032, United States
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: meg2008{at}columbia.edu.
In 1969 Robert Wurtz published three papers in the Journal of Neurophysiology on the physiology of the visual system in the awake monkey, of which two are reviewed here. The first described the technique of recording the activity of single neurons in the visual system of the awake monkey, and replicated Hubel and Wiesel's finding in the anesthetized monkey of cells with motion selectivity and orientation selectivity. The second showed that this system could be used to answer a cognitive question: could neurons in the striate cortex distinguish, as can normal humans, between the motion across of the retina of stimulus moving in the world, and the motion across the retina induced by the eye's moving across a stimulus stable in the world. All of the work today studying the physiology of visual cognition, looking at phenomena like attention, motion perception, motivation must trace their genesis back to these two papers.
