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Incremental integration of global contours through interplay between visual cortical areas
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Incremental integration of global contours through interplay between visual cortical areas

Minggui Chen, Yin Yan, Xiajing Gong, Charles D Gilbert, Hualou Liang and Wu Li
Neuron (Cambridge, Mass.), v 82(3), pp 682-694
07 May 2014
PMID: 24811385
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.03.023View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Action Potentials - physiology Animals Contrast Sensitivity - physiology Photic Stimulation - methods Male Macaca mulatta Visual Cortex - physiology
The traditional view on visual processing emphasizes a hierarchy: local line segments are first linked into global contours, which in turn are assembled into more complex forms. Distinct from this bottom-up viewpoint, here we provide evidence for a theoretical framework whereby objects and their parts are processed almost concurrently in a bidirectional cortico-cortical loop. By simultaneous recordings from V1 and V4 in awake monkeys, we found that information about global contours in a cluttered background emerged initially in V4, started ∼40 ms later in V1, and continued to develop in parallel in both areas. Detailed analysis of neuronal response properties implicated contour integration to emerge from both bottom-up and reentrant processes. Our results point to an incremental integration mechanism: feedforward assembling accompanied by feedback disambiguating to define and enhance the global contours and to suppress background noise. The consequence is a parallel accumulation of contour information over multiple cortical areas.

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