Early visual cortical responses produced by checkerboard pattern stimulation

Visual evoked potentials have been traditionally triggered with flash or reversing checkerboard stimuli and recorded with electroencephalographic techniques, largely but not exclusively in clinical or clinically related settings. They have been crucial in determining the healthy functioning or otherwise of the visual pathways up to and including the cerebral cortex. They have typically given early response latencies of 100ms, the source of which has been attributed to V1, with the prestriate cortex being secondarily activated somewhat later. On the other hand, magnetoencephalographic studies using stimuli better tailored to the physiology of individual, specialized, visual areas have given early latencies of <50ms with the sources localized in both striate (V1) and prestriate cortex. In this study, we used the reversing checkerboard pattern as a stimulus and recorded cortical visual evoked magnetic fields with magnetoencephalography, to establish whether very early responses can be traced to (estimated) in both striate and prestriate cortex, since such a demonstration would enhance considerably the power of this classical approach in clinical investigations. Our results show that cortical responses evoked by checkerboard patterns can be detected before 50ms post-stimulus onset and that their sources can be estimated in both striate and prestriate cortex, suggesting a strong parallel input from the sub-cortex to both striate and prestriate divisions of the visual cortex.