Primary visual cortex and memory: Retinal position specificity and lack of size constancy at early stages of learning a visual memory task in the macaque

Two monkeys were trained in a novel version of a delayed match-to-sample (DMS) task. They were required to fixate on a small spot at the center of the monitor and distinguish whether two gratings presented one after the other with delays up to 1.5 s in a specific visual field location were similar or not. It was found that such learning fails to transfer readily to other retinal locations. In fact, the learning was sensitive even to very small retinal displacements of the visual stimuli. Such acute retinal position specificity implies that at least a component of the learning in this particular memory task occurs at an early visual area such as the striate cortex, which has a fine-grain topographical representation. Furthermore, at early stages of learning the DMS task, when the monkeys had not generalized the learning to stimuli of different sizes, they failed to show size constancy. That is, when the display was placed at a different distance but with the same absolute size, the performance dropped. The performance was almost fully restored when, at the new display location, stimuli were changed to fit the original retinal size. This indicates that a crucial component of the learning does occur at a site even prior to size constancy. These results show that, under certain situations, an early visual area such as the primary visual cortex may be involved even in complex behaviours such as a memory task as more than just a feature-detecting area or a relay station.