Neuropixels Visual Coding Dataset Stimulus Dataframe Units

Hi,

I’ve been doing some work that uses the stimulus table dataframe for reconstructing the exact stimulus presented. I’m a bit uncertain as to what units are being used in this dataframe, particularly for the temporal_frequency, because in the whitepaper, the gabor/receptive field mapping describes the following.

All experiments began with a receptive field mapping stimulus consisting of 2 Hz, 0.04 cycles per degree drifting gratings with a 20º circular mask. These Gabor patches randomly appeared at one of 81 locations on the screen (9 x 9 grid) for 250 ms at a time, with no blank interval. The receptive field mapping stimulus was followed by a series of dark or light fullfield flashes, lasting 250 ms each and separated by a 2 second inter-trial interval.

However the dataframe shows a temporal frequency of 4

Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 Column 4 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U
stimulus_presentation_id stimulus_block start_time stop_time contrast mask temporal_frequency opacity x_position y_position size stimulus_name orientation frame spatial_frequency units color phase color_triplet duration stimulus_condition_id
1 0.0 84.49618798636119 84.72970394503696 0.8 circle 4.0 True 40.0 30.0 [20.0, 20.0] gabors 45.0 null 0.08 deg null [3644.93333333, 3644.93333333] [1.0, 1.0, 1.0] 0.2335159586757669 1

Could you please clarify what the units being used here are? Apologies in advance if some of this is self evident to the vision field.

Hi @basementcrusader – it appears the white paper is incorrect on this point. The actual temporal frequency we used (4 Hz) can be read out of the stimulus table.

Hi Josh,

Thanks for the clarification.

Best,

Nick B.