On the interactivity in the human visual cortex caused by specific and nonspecific inflows

Summary An interactivity (Sato, 1969) with respect not only to the interstimulus intervenal between the conditioned and test stimuli but also with respect to the time after the test stimulus was defined as a new generalized recovery function.The contour maps of the above interactivities of the cerebral evoked potentials elicited by the paired flash stimuli and by the conditioned cutaneous and test flash stimuli, respectively, were obtained in the adult human visual cortex.It was suggested to a certain degree by the autocorrelograms of background occipital EEGs and average VEPs that the more prominent VEPs are elicited, the more predominant are the alpha waves in the occipital background EEG, and vice versa. In the contour maps of the interactivity by the paired flash stimuli, cyclic changes of facilitory mountains and occlusive valleys were regular and conspicuous in the subject who exhibited predominant alpha waves in his background EEG, whereas the cyclic changes were less regular and less marked in the subject with few alpha waves in the background EEG.The cyclic changes in the former subject appeared at an interval of about 100 msec at an interstimulus interval of around 100 msec. This acts favorably in the contribution of the cyclic change in interactivity via natural stimulations to the generation of alpha waves in spontaneous EEG. The main facilitory mountains and occlusive valleys in the maps were arranged in a line parallel to the ordinate (axis of the interstimulus interval), which suggest that the conditioned flash will affect in a specific fashion each response compoment elicited via specific afferent inflows in the VEP timelocked to the test flash stimulus. On the contrary, those in the maps obtained by the conditioned cutaneous and test flash stimuli were diagonal to the abscissa (time after the test stimulus) and ordinate, and/or the peaks of facilitory mountains and bottoms of occlusive valleys tended to form a line parallel to the abscissa, which indicates that as the cutaneous somatosensory afferent inflow converges to the visual cortex nonspecific interactivities are exhibited in each component in the VEP.