We are trying to understand the brain's rules for encoding and decoding visual information in this way. One could reasonably argue that those rules equate to perception itself. Figure 2 Central to our thinking are the multidimensional spaces mapped out by cortical areas. Figure 2 shows such a space. These are continuous with each other through spiral intermediates, as shown in Figure 2.
Humans rely on optic flow cues to sense their direction of self-movement, or heading.
The transformations needed to convert image flow to heading are probably carried out in MSTd. Therefore, we would like to understand how the distribution of neural discharges in the MSTd tuning space encode our direction heading. Neurons in another area, called MT, are sensitive to the direction and speed of visual motion, as well as the depth of objects in the visual field. We think the distribution of activity in MT encodes such things as the coherence and separateness of image segments, as well as the direction and speed of moving objects. We are trying to understand how these different types of information are simultaneously expressed and read-out by other regions of the brain.