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Published on: January 23, 2017
Electrophysiological correlates of figure-ground segregation directly reflect perceptual saliency
Sirko Straube1, Cathleen Grimsen, Manfred Fahle
1Department of Human Neurobiology, University of Bremen, Hochschulring 18, 28359 Bremen, Germany. sirko.straube@uni-bremen.de <sirko.straube@uni-bremen.de>
Abstract:
In a figure identification task, we investigated the influence of different visual cue configurations (spatial frequency, orientation or a combination of both) on the human EEG. Combining psychophysics with ERP and time-frequency analysis, we show that the neural response at about 200ms reflects perceptual saliency rather than physical cue contrast. Increasing saliency caused (i) a negative shift of the posterior P2 coinciding with a power decrease in the posterior theta-band and (ii) an amplitude and latency increase of the posterior P3. We demonstrate that visual cues interact for a percept that is non-linearly related to the physical figure-ground properties.
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