Characterizing spatiotemporal population receptive fields in human visual cortex with fMRI.

We developed a computational framework for estimating spatiotemporal receptive fields of neural populations using fMRI. This framework pushes the boundary of fMRI measurements, enabling quantitative evaluation of neural spatial and temporal processing windows at the resolution of visual degrees and milliseconds, which was thought to be unattainable with fMRI. We not only replicate well-established visual field and pRF size maps, but also estimates of temporal summation windows from electrophysiology. Notably, we find that spatial and temporal windows as well as compressive nonlinearities progressively increase from early to later visual areas in multiple visual processing streams. Together, this framework opens exciting new possibilities for modeling and measuring fine-grained spatiotemporal dynamics of neural responses in the human brain using fMRI.