LETTER Communicated by Hugh Wilson Suprathreshold Intrinsic Dynamics of the Human Visual System

Intrinsic high-frequency neural activities have been observed in the vi-sual system of several species, but their functional significance for vi-sual perception remains a fundamental puzzle in cognitive neuroscience. Spatiotemporal integration in the human visual system acts as a low-pass filter and makes the psychophysical observation of high-frequency activi-ties very difficult. A computational model of retino-cortical dynamics (RE-COD) is used to derive experimental paradigms that allow psychophysi-cal studies of high-frequency neural activities. A reduced-parameter ver-sion of the model is used to quantitatively relate psychophysical data col-lected in two of these experimental paradigms. Statistical analysis shows that the model’s account of the variance in the data is, in general, highly significant. We suggest that psychophysically measured oscillations re-flect intrinsic neuronal oscillations observed in the visual cortex.