Andrea I Costantino, Benjamin O Turner, Mark A Williams, Matthew J Crossley
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Visual object recognition is driven through the what pathway, a hierarchy of visual areas processing features of increasing complexity and abstractness. The primary visual cortex (V1), this pathway's origin, exhibits retinotopic organization: neurons respond to stimuli in specific visual field regions. A neuron responding to a central stimulus won't respond to a peripheral one, and vice versa. However, despite this organization, task-relevant feedback about peripheral stimuli can be decoded in unstimulated foveal cortex, and disrupting this feedback impairs discrimination behavior. The information encoded by this feedback remains unclear, as prior studies used computer-generated objects ill-suited to dissociate different representation types. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated the nature of information encoded in periphery-to-fovea feedback using real-world stimuli. Participants performed a same/different discrimination task on peripherally displayed images of vehicles and faces. Using fMRI multivariate decoding, we found that both peripheral and foveal V1 could decode images separated by low-level perceptual models (vehicles) but not those separated by semantic models (faces). This suggests the feedback primarily carries low-level perceptual information. In contrast, higher visual areas resolved semantically distinct images. A functional connectivity analysis revealed foveal V1 connections to both peripheral V1 and later-stage visual areas. These findings indicate that while both early and late visual areas may contribute to information transfer from peripheral to foveal processing streams, higher-to-lower area transfer may involve information loss.
期刊介绍:
NeuroImage, a Journal of Brain Function provides a vehicle for communicating important advances in acquiring, analyzing, and modelling neuroimaging data and in applying these techniques to the study of structure-function and brain-behavior relationships. Though the emphasis is on the macroscopic level of human brain organization, meso-and microscopic neuroimaging across all species will be considered if informative for understanding the aforementioned relationships.