Functional organization of telencephalic visual association fields in pigeons

• Pigeons were trained to discriminate form/color or motion stimuli.
• Activity in higher visual areas was measured by ZENK expression.
• Higher visual areas in pigeons process both form/color and motion information.
• Integration of form/color and motion within one region might minimize long-range connections.

Birds show remarkable visual abilities that surpass most of our visual psychophysiological abilities. In this study, we investigated visual associative areas of the tectofugal visual system in pigeons. Similar to the condition in mammals, ascending visual pathways in birds are subdivided into parallel form/color vs. motion streams at the thalamic and primary telencephalic level. However, we know practically nothing about the functional organization of those telencephalic areas that receive input from the primary visual telencephalic fields. The current study therefore had two objectives: first, to reveal whether these visual associative areas of the tectofugal system are activated during visual discrimination tasks; second, to test whether separated form/color vs. motion pathways can be discerned among these association fields. To this end, we trained pigeons to discriminate either form/color or motion stimuli and used the immediate early gene protein ZENK to capture the activity of the visual associative areas during the task. We could indeed identify several visual associative telencephalic structures by activity pattern changes during discriminations. However, none of these areas displayed a difference between form/color vs. motion sessions. The presence of such a distinction in thalamo-telencephalic, but not in further downstream visual association areas opens the possibility that these separate streams converge very early in birds, which possibly minimizes long-range connections due to the evolutionary pressure toward miniaturized brains.