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Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Published on: March 18, 2019

Neural representation of gestalt grouping and attention effect in human visual cortex

Hao Wu¹, Zhentao Zuo², Zejian Yuan³

¹School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710048, China.

Journal of Neuroscience Methods

|October 2, 2023

Abstract

Background:

The brain aggregates meaningless local sensory elements to form meaningful global patterns in a process called perceptual grouping. Current brain imaging studies have found that neural activities in V1 are modulated during visual grouping. However, how grouping is represented in each of the early visual areas, and how attention alters these representations, is still unknown.

New Method:

We adopted MVPA to decode the specific content of perceptual grouping by comparing neural activity patterns between gratings and dot lattice stimuli which can be grouped with proximity law. Furthermore, we quantified the grouping effect by defining the strength of grouping, and assessed the effect of attention on grouping.

Results:

We found that activity patterns to proximity grouped stimuli in early visual areas resemble these to grating stimuli with the same orientations. This similarity exists even when there is no attention focused on the stimuli. The results also showed a progressive increase of representational strength of grouping from V1 to V3, and attention modulation to grouping is only significant in V3 among all the visual areas.

Comparison With Existing Methods:

Most of the previous work on perceptual grouping has focused on how activity amplitudes are modulated by grouping. Using MVPA, the present work successfully decoded the contents of neural activity patterns corresponding to proximity grouping stimuli, thus shed light on the availability of content-decoding approach in the research on perceptual grouping.

Conclusions:

Our work found that the content of the neural activity patterns during perceptual grouping can be decoded in the early visual areas under both attended and unattended task, and provide novel evidence that there is a cascade processing for proximity grouping through V1 to V3. The strength of grouping was larger in V3 than in any other visual areas, and the attention modulation to the strength of grouping was only significant in V3 among all the visual areas, implying that V3 plays an important role in proximity grouping.

Keywords:

Attention FMRI Perceptual grouping Representational similarity analysis Visual perception

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