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Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision

Several types of suppression phenomena have been observed in the visual system. For example, the ability to detect a target stimulus is often impaired when the target is embedded in a high-contrast surround. This contextual modulation, known as surround suppression, was formerly thought to occur onl...

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Autores principales: Cai, Yong-Chun, Lu, Shena, Li, Chao-Yi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3360642/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22662270
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038093
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author Cai, Yong-Chun
Lu, Shena
Li, Chao-Yi
author_facet Cai, Yong-Chun
Lu, Shena
Li, Chao-Yi
author_sort Cai, Yong-Chun
collection PubMed
description Several types of suppression phenomena have been observed in the visual system. For example, the ability to detect a target stimulus is often impaired when the target is embedded in a high-contrast surround. This contextual modulation, known as surround suppression, was formerly thought to occur only in the periphery. Another type of suppression phenomena is interocular suppression, in which the sensitivity to a monocular target is reduced by a superimposed mask in the opposite eye. Here, we explored how the two types of suppression operating across different spatial regions interact with one another when they simultaneously exert suppressive influences on a common target presented at the fovea. In our experiments, a circular target grating presented to the fovea of one eye was suppressed interocularly by a noise pattern of the same size in the other eye. The foveal stimuli were either shown alone or surrounded by a monocular annular grating. The orientation and eye-of-origin of the surround grating were varied. We found that the detection of the foveal target subjected to interocular suppression was severely impaired by the addition of the surround grating, indicating strong surround suppression in the fovea. In contrast, when the interocular suppression was released by superimposing a binocular fusion ring onto both the target and the dichoptic mask, the surround suppression effect was found to be dramatically decreased. In addition, the surround suppression was found to depend on the contrast of the dichoptic noise with the greatest surround suppression effect being obtained only when the noise contrast was at an intermediate level. These findings indicate that surround suppression and interocular suppression are not independent of each other, but there are strong interactions between them. Moreover, our results suggest that strong surround suppression may also occur at the fovea and not just the periphery.
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spelling pubmed-33606422012-06-01 Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision Cai, Yong-Chun Lu, Shena Li, Chao-Yi PLoS One Research Article Several types of suppression phenomena have been observed in the visual system. For example, the ability to detect a target stimulus is often impaired when the target is embedded in a high-contrast surround. This contextual modulation, known as surround suppression, was formerly thought to occur only in the periphery. Another type of suppression phenomena is interocular suppression, in which the sensitivity to a monocular target is reduced by a superimposed mask in the opposite eye. Here, we explored how the two types of suppression operating across different spatial regions interact with one another when they simultaneously exert suppressive influences on a common target presented at the fovea. In our experiments, a circular target grating presented to the fovea of one eye was suppressed interocularly by a noise pattern of the same size in the other eye. The foveal stimuli were either shown alone or surrounded by a monocular annular grating. The orientation and eye-of-origin of the surround grating were varied. We found that the detection of the foveal target subjected to interocular suppression was severely impaired by the addition of the surround grating, indicating strong surround suppression in the fovea. In contrast, when the interocular suppression was released by superimposing a binocular fusion ring onto both the target and the dichoptic mask, the surround suppression effect was found to be dramatically decreased. In addition, the surround suppression was found to depend on the contrast of the dichoptic noise with the greatest surround suppression effect being obtained only when the noise contrast was at an intermediate level. These findings indicate that surround suppression and interocular suppression are not independent of each other, but there are strong interactions between them. Moreover, our results suggest that strong surround suppression may also occur at the fovea and not just the periphery. Public Library of Science 2012-05-25 /pmc/articles/PMC3360642/ /pubmed/22662270 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038093 Text en Cai et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Cai, Yong-Chun
Lu, Shena
Li, Chao-Yi
Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision
title Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision
title_full Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision
title_fullStr Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision
title_full_unstemmed Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision
title_short Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision
title_sort interactions between surround suppression and interocular suppression in human vision
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3360642/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22662270
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038093
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