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Jacob Jolij
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011) 23 (12): 3734–3745.
Published: 01 December 2011
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Humans largely guide their behavior by their visual representation of the world. Recent studies have shown that visual information can trigger behavior within 150 msec, suggesting that visually guided responses to external events, in fact, precede conscious awareness of those events. However, is such a view correct? By using a texture discrimination task, we show that the brain relies on long-latency visual processing in order to guide perceptual decisions. Decreasing stimulus saliency leads to selective changes in long-latency visually evoked potential components reflecting scene segmentation. These latency changes are accompanied by almost equal changes in simple RTs and points of subjective simultaneity. Furthermore, we find a strong correlation between individual RTs and the latencies of scene segmentation related components in the visually evoked potentials, showing that the processes underlying these late brain potentials are critical in triggering a response. However, using the same texture stimuli in an antisaccade task, we found that reflexive, but erroneous, prosaccades, but not antisaccades, can be triggered by earlier visual processes. In other words: The brain can act quickly, but decides late. Differences between our study and earlier findings suggesting that action precedes conscious awareness can be explained by assuming that task demands determine whether a fast and unconscious, or a slower and conscious, representation is used to initiate a visually guided response.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008) 20 (11): 2097–2109.
Published: 01 November 2008
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In texture segregation, an example of scene segmentation, we can discern two different processes: texture boundary detection and subsequent surface segregation [Lamme, V. A. F., Rodriguez-Rodriguez, V., & Spekreijse, H. Separate processing dynamics for texture elements, boundaries and surfaces in primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey. Cerebral Cortex, 9, 406–413, 1999]. Neural correlates of texture boundary detection have been found in monkey V1 [Sillito, A. M., Grieve, K. L., Jones, H. E., Cudeiro, J., & Davis, J. Visual cortical mechanisms detecting focal orientation discontinuities. Nature, 378, 492–496, 1995; Grosof, D. H., Shapley, R. M., & Hawken, M. J. Macaque-V1 neurons can signal illusory contours. Nature, 365, 550–552, 1993], but whether surface segregation occurs in monkey V1 [Rossi, A. F., Desimone, R., & Ungerleider, L. G. Contextual modulation in primary visual cortex of macaques. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 1698–1709, 2001; Lamme, V. A. F. The neurophysiology of figure ground segregation in primary visual-cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 1605–1615, 1995], and whether boundary detection or surface segregation signals can also be measured in human V1, is more controversial [Kastner, S., De Weerd, P., & Ungerleider, L. G. Texture segregation in the human visual cortex: A functional MRI study. Journal of Neurophysiology, 83, 2453–2457, 2000]. Here we present electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging data that have been recorded with a paradigm that makes it possible to differentiate between boundary detection and scene segmentation in humans. In this way, we were able to show with EEG that neural correlates of texture boundary detection are first present in the early visual cortex around 92 msec and then spread toward the parietal and temporal lobes. Correlates of surface segregation first appear in temporal areas (around 112 msec) and from there appear to spread to parietal, and back to occipital areas. After 208 msec, correlates of surface segregation and boundary detection also appear in more frontal areas. Blood oxygenation level-dependent magnetic resonance imaging results show correlates of boundary detection and surface segregation in all early visual areas including V1. We conclude that texture boundaries are detected in a feedforward fashion and are represented at increasing latencies in higher visual areas. Surface segregation, on the other hand, is represented in “reverse hierarchical” fashion and seems to arise from feedback signals toward early visual areas such as V1.