ABSTRACT
Pioneering work from Mountcastle’s laboratory (1987, 1991) on the parietal cortex of monkeys demonstrated that unit responses to moving visual stimuli could be profitably viewed as population responses depicted in terms of neural population vectors derived from regression of neuronal response data to a sinusoid. This analysis indicated that the population vectors are directionality arranged in an opponent fashion along a single meridian. Their analysis further showed that opponent neuronal responses to directional movement of a stimulus could be modelled as a difference of gaussians (Motter, Steinmetz, Duffy and Mountcastle, 1987). Analysis of neuronal responses by population vectors was also used by Georgopolous (1983) in which vector representations of neuronal responses accurately predicted direction of arm movements by monkeys.
