Forty years ago R.W. Rodieck introduced the
Difference-of-Gaussians (DOG) model, and this model has been
widely used by the visual neuroscience community to quantitatively account
for spatial response properties of cells in the retina and lateral
geniculate nucleus following visual stimulation. Circular patches of
drifting gratings are now regularly used as visual stimuli when probing
the early visual system, but for this stimulus type the mathematical
evaluation of the DOG-model response is significantly more complicated
than for moving bars, full-field drifting gratings, or circular flashing
spots. Here we derive mathematical formulas for the DOG-model response to
centered circular patch gratings. The response is found to be given as the
difference between two summed series, where each term in the series
involves the confluent hypergeometric function. This function is available
in commonly used mathematical software, and the results should thus be
readily applicable. Example results illustrate how a strong surround
suppression in area-summation curves for iso-luminant circular spots may
be reversed into a surround enhancement for circular patch gratings. They
also show that the spatial-frequency response changes from band-pass to
low-pass when going from the full-field grating situation to the situation
where the patch covers only the receptive-field center.