Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The visual system needs to identify perceptually relevant borders to segment complex natural scenes. The primary visual cortex (V1) is thought to extract local borders, and higher visual areas are thought to identify the perceptually relevant borders between objects and the background. To test this conjecture, we used natural images that had been annotated by human observers who marked the perceptually relevant borders. We assessed the effect of perceptual relevance on V1 responses using human neuroimaging, macaque electrophysiology, and computational modeling. We report that perceptually relevant borders elicit stronger responses in the early visual cortex than irrelevant ones, even if simple features, such as contrast and the energy of oriented filters, are matched. Moreover, V1 neurons discriminate perceptually relevant borders surprisingly fast, during the early feedforward-driven activity at a latency of ~50 ms, indicating that they are tuned to the features that characterize them. We also revealed a delayed, contextual effect that enhances the V1 responses that are elicited by perceptually relevant borders at a longer latency. Our results reveal multiple mechanisms that allow V1 neurons to infer the layout of objects in natural images.
Institutions: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut de la Vision, Inserm, Amsterdam UMC Location University of Amsterdam, Sorbonne Université, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Utrecht University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Awards: G1040723844, G1059559622, Neural Active Visual Prosthetics for Restoring Function, G2207080613, G2760294848, G2895672154, G3070827051, G3233402022, G3533790690, G4058904449, G434337789, G5064038895, G5288264514, G5532919195, A window to the mind: How real and instilled subjective experiences shape visual perception, Visual perception: population receptive field dynamics in the human brain, G7762491722, A novel data-driven model of visual activity across multiple brain regions, G7990072092, G8060524251
OpenAlex ID: W4404024832