The visual system adapts to its recent history. A phenomenon related to this is repetition suppression (RS), a reduction in neural responses to repeated compared with nonrepeated visual input. An intriguing hypothesis is that the timescale over which RS occurs across the visual hierarchy is tuned to the temporal statistics of visual input features, which change rapidly in low-level areas but are more stable in higher level areas. Here, we tested this hypothesis by studying the influence of the temporal lag between successive visual stimuli on RS throughout the visual system using functional (f)MRI. Twelve human volunteers engaged in four fMRI sessions in which we characterized the blood oxygen level-dependent response to pairs of repeated and nonrepeated natural images with interstimulus intervals (ISI) ranging from 50 to 1,000 ms to quantify the temporal tuning of RS along the posterior-anterior axis of the visual system. As expected, RS was maximal for short ISIs and decayed with increasing ISI. Crucially, however, and against our hypothesis, RS decayed at a similar rate in early and late visual areas. This finding challenges the prevailing view that the timescale of RS increases along the posterior-anterior axis of the visual system and suggests that RS is not tuned to temporal input regularities.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Visual areas show reduced neural responses to repeated compared with nonrepeated visual input, a phenomenon termed repetition suppression (RS). Here we show that RS decays at a similar rate in low- and high-level visual areas, suggesting that the short-term decay of RS across the visual hierarchy is not tuned to temporal input regularities. This may limit the specificity with which the mechanisms underlying RS could optimize the processing of input features across the visual hierarchy.
Keywords: adaptation; fMRI; repetition suppression; temporal tuning; visual processing.