Neurons in visual areas of the brain are generally characterized by the increase in firing rate that occurs when a stimulus is flashed on in the receptive field (RF). However, neurons also increase their firing rate when a stimulus is turned off. These “termination responses” or “after-discharges” that occur with flashed stimuli have been observed in area V1 and they may be important for vision as stimulus terminations have been shown to influence visual perception. The goal of the present study was to determine the strength of termination responses in the more natural situation in which eye movements move a stimulus out of an RF. We find that termination responses do occur in macaque V1 when termination results from a saccadic eye movement, but they are smaller in amplitude compared to flashed-off stimuli. Furthermore, there are termination responses even in the absence of visual stimulation. These findings demonstrate that termination responses are a component of naturalistic vision. They appear to be based on both visual and nonvisual signals in visual cortex. We speculate that the weakening of termination responses might be a neural correlate of saccadic suppression, the loss of perceptual sensitivity around the time of saccades.

Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that retinal detachment (RD) subjects were associated with abnormal spontaneous brain activities; however, whether the altered interhemispheric functional connectivity (FC) occurred in RD patients remains unknown. The current study tried to explore the alternations of interhemispheric FC of the whole brain in unilateral RD patients using the voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) method and their connections to clinical features. Methods: We recruited 30 patients with RD (16 males and 14 females) and 30 healthy controls (HCs) (16 males and 14 females) whose age and sex were closely matched. All subjects underwent the rs-fMRI scans. The VMHC method was applied to directly assess the hemispheres’ functional interaction. The VMHC in these brain areas, which could be used as biomarkers to differentiate RD from HC, was identified by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses. The relations between these patients’ clinical features and their mean VMHC signal values in multiple brain regions were calculated by Pearson correlation analysis. Results: RD patients had significantly lower VMHC values than HCs in the bilateral occipital lobe (Brodmann areas, BA 18), bilateral superior temporal gyrus (BA 39), and bilateral cuneus (BA 19). Moreover, the mean VMHC signal values of the bilateral cuneus were in positive correlation with the duration of the RD (r = 0.446, P = 0.013). Conclusion: Our results provided an evidence of disturbed interhemispheric FC in the visual area occurred in RD patients, which might provide some useful information to understand the neural mechanism of RD patients with acute vision loss. Furthermore, the VMHC values might indicate the progress of the RD.

Although much is known about the visual system of vertebrates in general, studies regarding vision in reptiles, and snakes in particular, are scarce. Reptiles display diverse ocular structures, including different types of retinae such as pure cone, mostly rod, or duplex retinas (containing both rods and cones); however, the same five opsin-based photopigments are found in many of these animals. It is thought that ancestral snakes were nocturnal and/or fossorial, and, as such, they have lost two pigments, but retained three visual opsin classes. These are the RH1 gene (rod opsin or rhodopsin-like-1) expressed in rods and two cone opsins, namely LWS (long-wavelength-sensitive) and SWS1 (short-wavelength-sensitive-1) genes. Until recently, the study of snake photopigments has been largely ignored. However, its importance has become clear within the past few years as studies reconsider Walls’ transmutation theory, which was first proposed in the 1930s. In this study, the visual pigments of Bothrops atrox (the common lancehead), a South American pit viper, were examined. Specifically, full-length RH1 and LWS opsin gene sequences were cloned, as well as most of the SWS1 opsin gene. These sequences were subsequently used for phylogenetic analysis and to predict the wavelength of maximum absorbance (λmax) for each photopigment. This is the first report to support the potential for rudimentary color vision in a South American viper, specifically a species that is regarded as being nocturnal.