Contour integration in the primary visual cortex of the opossum.

To investigate whether contour integration is a generalized mammalian feature we studied single cells in V1 on the South-America opossum ( ), a plesiomorphic animal believed to retain basic characteristics of early mammals. We observed that when a cell's receptive field (RF) was masked (i.e. an artificial scotoma was produced), sweeping a long bar (several times the length of the RF) at the cell's preferred orientation elicited robust responses in many cells (28/103, or 27%). Therefore, some cells in the primary visual cortex of the opossum interpolate under conditions consistent with physical occlusion. The present results indicate that the property of contour integration appears to be a basic property of the mammalian visual system.