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

Hao Wu; Zhentao Zuo; Zejian Yuan; Tiangang Zhou; Yan Zhuo; Nanning Zheng; Badong Chen

doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2023.109980

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

J Neurosci Methods. 2023 Nov 1:399:109980. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2023.109980. Epub 2023 Sep 30.

Authors

Hao Wu¹, Zhentao Zuo², Zejian Yuan³, Tiangang Zhou⁴, Yan Zhuo⁴, Nanning Zheng³, Badong Chen⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710048, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Electronic address: ztzuo@bcslab.ibp.ac.cn.
³ National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710049, China; Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710049, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁵ National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710049, China; Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710049, China. Electronic address: chenbd@mail.xjtu.edu.cn.

PMID: 37783351
DOI: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2023.109980

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.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Attention*
Brain
Brain Mapping
Humans
Photic Stimulation
Visual Cortex*
Visual Perception