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Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes

Figure-ground organization and border-ownership assignment are essential for understanding natural scenes. It has been shown that many neurons in the macaque visual cortex signal border-ownership in displays of simple geometric shapes such as squares, but how well these neurons resolve border-owners...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Williford, Jonathan R., von der Heydt, Rüdiger
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Society for Neuroscience 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5197405/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28058269
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0127-16.2016
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author Williford, Jonathan R.
von der Heydt, Rüdiger
author_facet Williford, Jonathan R.
von der Heydt, Rüdiger
author_sort Williford, Jonathan R.
collection PubMed
description Figure-ground organization and border-ownership assignment are essential for understanding natural scenes. It has been shown that many neurons in the macaque visual cortex signal border-ownership in displays of simple geometric shapes such as squares, but how well these neurons resolve border-ownership in natural scenes is not known. We studied area V2 neurons in behaving macaques with static images of complex natural scenes. We found that about half of the neurons were border-ownership selective for contours in natural scenes, and this selectivity originated from the image context. The border-ownership signals emerged within 70 ms after stimulus onset, only ∼30 ms after response onset. A substantial fraction of neurons were highly consistent across scenes. Thus, the cortical mechanisms of figure-ground organization are fast and efficient even in images of complex natural scenes. Understanding how the brain performs this task so fast remains a challenge.
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spelling pubmed-51974052017-01-05 Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes Williford, Jonathan R. von der Heydt, Rüdiger eNeuro New Research Figure-ground organization and border-ownership assignment are essential for understanding natural scenes. It has been shown that many neurons in the macaque visual cortex signal border-ownership in displays of simple geometric shapes such as squares, but how well these neurons resolve border-ownership in natural scenes is not known. We studied area V2 neurons in behaving macaques with static images of complex natural scenes. We found that about half of the neurons were border-ownership selective for contours in natural scenes, and this selectivity originated from the image context. The border-ownership signals emerged within 70 ms after stimulus onset, only ∼30 ms after response onset. A substantial fraction of neurons were highly consistent across scenes. Thus, the cortical mechanisms of figure-ground organization are fast and efficient even in images of complex natural scenes. Understanding how the brain performs this task so fast remains a challenge. Society for Neuroscience 2016-12-29 /pmc/articles/PMC5197405/ /pubmed/28058269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0127-16.2016 Text en Copyright © 2016 Williford and von der Heydt http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
spellingShingle New Research
Williford, Jonathan R.
von der Heydt, Rüdiger
Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes
title Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes
title_full Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes
title_fullStr Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes
title_full_unstemmed Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes
title_short Figure-Ground Organization in Visual Cortex for Natural Scenes
title_sort figure-ground organization in visual cortex for natural scenes
topic New Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5197405/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28058269
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0127-16.2016
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