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Interactions between feedback and lateral connections in the primary visual cortex
Journal article   Open access

Interactions between feedback and lateral connections in the primary visual cortex

Hualou Liang, Xiajing Gong, Minggui Chen, Yin Yan, Wu Li and Charles D. Gilbert
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, v 114(32), pp 8637-8642
24 Jul 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706183114
PMID: 28739915
url
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706183114View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze),  Open

Abstract

Biological Sciences contour integration feedback connection Granger causality horizontal connection perceptual grouping
One of the fundamental tasks of vision is to group the image elements that belong to one object and to segregate them from other objects and the background. Such a process, known as contour integration, is thought of as involving both long-range horizontal connections in the primary visual cortex (V1) and feedback influences from higher cortical areas such as V4. Using conditional Granger causality analysis of simultaneously recorded neurons in monkey visual cortical areas V1 and V4, we are able to dissect the respective contributions of intraareal and interareal interactions during contour integration, indicating that feedback and lateral connections work synergistically to group and segment visual image components. Perceptual grouping of line segments into object contours has been thought to be mediated, in part, by long-range horizontal connectivity intrinsic to the primary visual cortex (V1), with a contribution by top-down feedback projections. To dissect the contributions of intraareal and interareal connections during contour integration, we applied conditional Granger causality analysis to assess directional influences among neural signals simultaneously recorded from visual cortical areas V1 and V4 of monkeys performing a contour detection task. Our results showed that discounting the influences from V4 markedly reduced V1 lateral interactions, indicating dependence on feedback signals of the effective connectivity within V1. On the other hand, the feedback influences were reciprocally dependent on V1 lateral interactions because the modulation strengths from V4 to V1 were greatly reduced after discounting the influences from other V1 neurons. Our findings suggest that feedback and lateral connections closely interact to mediate image grouping and segmentation.

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