Magnetic and electrical responses of the human brain to texture-defined form and to textons

1. We searched for a neurophysical correlate of preattentive texture discrimination by recording magnetic and electric evoked responses from the human brain during the first few hundred milliseconds following the presentation of texture-defined (TD) checkerboard form. The only two textons that changed when the TD checkerboard appeared or disappeared were the local orientation and line termination textons. (Textons are conspicuous local features within a texture pattern). 2. Our evidence that the magnetic response to TD form cannot be explained in terms of responses to the two associated textons is as follows: 1) by dissociating the two responses we showed that the magnetic response to TD form is almost entirely independent of the magnetic response to the local orientation texton; 2) a further distinction between the two responses is that their distributions over the head are different; and 3) the magnetic response to TD form differs from the magnetic response to the line termination texton in both distribution over the head and waveform. We conclude that this evidence identifies the existence of a brain response correlate of preattentive texture discrimination. 3. We also recorded brain responses to luminance-defined (LD) checkerboard form. Our grounds for concluding that magnetic brain responses to the onset of checkerboard form are generated by different and independent neural systems for TD and LD form are as follows: 1) magnetic responses to the onset of TD form and LD form had different distributions over the skull, had different waveforms, and depended differently on check size; and 2) the waveform of the response to superimposed TD and LD checks closely approximated the linear sum of responses to TD checks and LD checks alone. 4. One possible explanation for the observed differences between the magnetic and electric evoked responses is that responses to both onset and offset of TD form predominantly involve neurons aligned parallel to the skull, whereas that is not the case for responses to LD form.