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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 3, 2026

Investigating Object Representations in the Macaque Dorsal Visual Stream Using Single-unit Recordings

Investigating Object Representations in the Macaque Dorsal Visual Stream Using Single-unit Recordings

Published on: August 1, 2018

Occipital network for figure/ground organization.

Lora T Likova¹, Christopher W Tyler

¹The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, CA, USA. lora@ski.org

Experimental Brain Research

|July 8, 2008

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Figure/ground categorization in the brain involves top-down suppression of early visual cortex (V1/V2) signals by the motion complex (hMT+/V5+). This mechanism helps organize dynamic visual scenes.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Visual Perception

Background:

Figure/ground categorization is fundamental to visual perception, enabling the segregation of objects from their backgrounds.
Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying this process is crucial for comprehending visual scene analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the cortical mechanisms of figure/ground categorization in the human brain.
To identify the specific brain regions and pathways involved in distinguishing figures from their grounds.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was utilized in conjunction with a temporal-asynchrony paradigm.
This paradigm isolates global perceptual interactions by eliminating differential activation from local stimulus features.

Main Results:

Figure/ground configuration induced suppression in early retinotopic visual cortex (V1/V2) and strong activation in the motion complex (hMT+/V5+).
Eliminating figure/ground organization abolished these differential activations, indicating their specificity to the task.

Conclusions:

Figure/ground processing relies on top-down suppression from the motion complex to early visual areas.
A recurrent cortical architecture with suppressive feedback underlies figure/ground categorization for dynamic scene perception.