Studying Cortical Plasticity in Ophthalmic and Neurological Disorders: From Stimulus-Driven to Cortical Circuitry Modeling Approaches

Figure 1

The population receptive field (pRF) modeling procedure. A pRF model describes, per voxel, the estimated pRF properties position () and size (). A voxel’s response to the stimulus is calculated as the overlap between the stimulus mask (the binary image of the stimulus aperture: a moving bar) at each time point and the receptive field model. Following this, the delay in hemodynamic response is accounted for by convolving the predicted time courses with the hemodynamic response function. Finally, the pRF model parameters are adjusted for each voxel to minimize the difference between the prediction and the measured BOLD signal. The best fitting parameters are the output of the analysis. Figure adapted from Dumoulin and Wandell [3].