Interactions of visual stimuli in the receptive fields of inferior temporal neurons in awake macaques.

Monkeys were trained to perform a fixation task and a visual discrimination task. During the fixation task, one or two light bars were presented at different positions in the receptive fields of TE neurons. During the discrimination task, the animal was required to detect the positive stimulus when one or two of the paired small colored spots or two-dimensional patterns were presented. In both behavioral conditions, when the two light stimuli were presented simultaneously, almost none of the TE neurons showed an increase in responding over the single stimulus condition; the response was usually similar or less than the stronger response in the single stimulus condition. In the neurons that responded selectively to the discriminanda during the discrimination task, various interactions between the two antagonistic stimuli occurred depending on the location or the effectiveness of the two stimuli. These results may be related to gain control mechanisms in the wide receptive fields of TE neurons.