Several recent animal studies have demonstrated that in addition to processing basic features of visual stimuli, BA 17 is also involved in reward processing. For example, Schuler and Bear (2006) demonstrated that in rodents exposed to visual stimuli previously paired with a reward, neurons in the primary visual cortex responded to the timing of the reward rather than the physical attributes of the stimulus itself. The sensitivity of the visual cortex to reward has also been described in non-human primates using electrophysiological (Keliris et al., 2010) and neuroimaging approaches (Arsenault et al., 2013), as well as in rodents using two-photon imaging of visual cortex (Goltstein et al., 2013). Arsenault and colleagues (2013), for example, demonstrated that dopamine signaling can selectively modulate visual cortex activity and that, following a visually paired reward association task, the visual cortex of monkeys was activated by being rewarded in the absence of any image. Taken together, these basic science findings are consistent with the results of the present study, that the rewarding properties of a cue may be reflected by activation in primary visual cortex.
