Neural Correlates of Speed Processing in the Primate Visual Area MT

The visual world is processed in the brain as a series of characteristics, where the information is interpreted in different regions. For example, the colour and direction of an object will be processed via different neural pathways. However, there has long been ambiguity associated with how and where the speed of motion is processed. While investigating speed-tuning, I found that the stimulus used during experiments was crucial - by replacing the commonly used stimulus with one that traverses the visual field, almost 50% of neurons that were originally found to not encode for speed, became speed-tuned.