Masking Interrupts Figure-Ground Signals in V1

By Victor A. F. Lamme, Karl Zipser, Henk Spekreijse. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2002

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a backward masking paradigm, a target stimulus is rapidly (<100 msec) followed by a second stimulus. This typically results in a dramatic decrease in the visibility of the target stimulus. It has been shown that masking reduces responses in V1. It is not known, however, which process in V1 is affected by the mask. In the past, we have shown that in V1, modulations of neural activity that are specifically related to figure-ground segregation can be recorded. Here, we recorded from awake macaque monkeys, engaged in a task where they had to detect figures from background in a pattern backward masking paradigm. We show that the V1 figure-ground signals are selectively and fully suppressed at target-mask intervals that psychophysically result in the target being invisible. Initial response transients, signalling the features that make up the scene, are not affected. As figure-ground modulations depend on feedback from extrastriate areas, these results suggest that masking selectively interrupts the recurrent interactions between V1 and higher visual areas.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f608dca146149e327cb97f6658b43ff4fed6b26d

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Why visual attention and awareness are different. (2003, background): “Neurophysiological manifestations of recurrent interactions are, however, suppressed by backward masking [30,40, 44 ].”
Timing of the brain events underlying access to consciousness during the attentional blink (2005, background): “Electrophysiological recordings in the macaque area V1 confirm that early visual activation can be fully preserved on trials in which the animal reports no perceptio”
Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness (2007, background): “the target, but its locus remains debated [1,9,42,43,49].”
On the Time Course of Visual Word Recognition: An Event-related Potential Investigation using Masked Repetition Priming (2006, background): “Lamme et al. (2002) and Lamme, Supèr, and Spekreijse (1998) argue that it is this blocking of recurrent processing that normally occurs for fully visible items, which impedes awareness of the masked item.”
The Limits of Feedforward Vision: Recurrent Processing Promotes Robust Object Recognition when Objects Are Degraded (2012, unknown): “By using backward masking to selectively disrupt influence from recurrent processing mechanisms (Boehler et al., 2008; Fahrenfort et al., 2007, 2008; Lamme et al., 2002), we were able to infer its function during the recognition of degraded visual stimuli.”
Evidence that recurrent circuits are critical to the ventral stream’s execution of core object recognition behavior (2018, background): “This type of backward masking has been previously associated with selective disruption of the recurrent inputs to an area from other areas (Fahrenfort et al., 2007; Lamme et al., 2002).”
A Hierarchy of Responses to Auditory Regularities in the Macaque Brain (2014, unknown): “…of consciousness in monkeys, which indicate that they too experience blindsight (Cowey and Stoerig, 1995), masking (Macknik and Haglund, 1999; Lamme et al., 2002), and binocular rivalry (Leopold and Logothetis, 1999), with properties similar to humans and that they also possess a…”
Masking Disrupts Reentrant Processing in Human Visual Cortex (2007, background): “A study in which the effect of target–mask SOA on contextual modulation in macaque V1 was investigated showed a strong relation between SOA, contextual modulation, and the monkey’s ability to detect a texturedefined figure (Lamme et al., 2002).”