High-resolution eye tracking using V1 neuron activity

Studies of high-acuity visual cortical processing have been limited by the inability to track eye position with sufficient accuracy to precisely reconstruct the visual stimulus on the retina. As a result, studies of primary visual cortex (V1) have been performed almost entirely on neurons outside the high-resolution central portion of the visual field (the fovea). Here we describe a procedure for inferring eye position using multi-electrode array recordings from V1 coupled with nonlinear stimulus processing models. We show that this method can be used to infer eye position with 1 arc-min accuracy—significantly better than conventional techniques. This allows for analysis of foveal stimulus processing, and provides a means to correct for eye movement-induced biases present even outside the fovea. This method could thus reveal critical insights into the role of eye movements in cortical coding, as well as their contribution to measures of cortical variability.