Development of a Wide-view Visual Presentation System in the fMRI Environment

Retinotopic mapping is one of the most important experimental procedures in brain mapping the human visual system. Due to technical problems in previous studies applying fMRI retinotopy on human subjects, which typically used a central and/or pericentral visual field stimulus (8-30 deg of eccentricity from the fixation point), retinotopic characteristics of peripheral vision in humans are still unclear. To overcome this obstacle, we developed the wide-view visual presentation system with a horizontal visual angle of 120 deg and a vertical angle of 120 deg using nonmagnetic optical fibers and contact lens for fMRI. In this paper, we introduce the functions and performance of this system and report the results of our evaluative experiment.