Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context

Smith, F.W. and Muckli, L. (2010) Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(46), pp. 20099-20103. (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1000233107) (PMID:21041652) (PMCID:PMC2993348)

Abstract

Even within the early sensory areas, the majority of the input to any given cortical neuron comes from other cortical neurons. To extend our knowledge of the contextual information that is transmitted by such lateral and feedback connections, we investigated how visually nonstimulated regions in primary visual cortex (V1) and visual area V2 are influenced by the surrounding context. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and pattern-classification methods to show that the cortical representation of a nonstimulated quarter-field carries information that can discriminate the surrounding visual context. We show further that the activity patterns in these regions are significantly related to those observed with feed-forward stimulation and that these effects are driven primarily by V1. These results thus demonstrate that visual context strongly influences early visual areas even in the absence of differential feed-forward thalamic stimulation.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Muckli, Professor Lars and Smith, Dr Fraser
• Authors: Smith, F.W., and Muckli, L.
• Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience; College of Science and Engineering > School of Psychology
• Journal Name: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
• ISSN: 0027-8424
• ISSN (Online): 1091-6490
• Published Online: 01 November 2010
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2010 National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107(46):20099-20103
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
47448	1	Brain processes predicting forthcoming perception - cortical feedback and visual predictions	Lars Muckli	Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)	BB/G005044/1	Cognitive Neuroimaging & Neuroengineering Technologies