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The Journal of Neuroscience, January 14, 2009, 29(2):460-465; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4628-08.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Border Ownership Selectivity in Human Early Visual Cortex and its Modulation by Attention

Fang Fang,¹ Huseyin Boyaci,² and Daniel Kersten³

¹Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China, ²Department of Psychology, Bilkent University, Ankara 06800, Turkey, and ³Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455

Correspondence should be addressed to Fang Fang, Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. Email: ffang{at}pku.edu.cn

Natural images are usually cluttered because objects occlude one another. A critical aspect of recognizing these visual objects is to identify the borders between image regions that belong to different objects. However, the neural coding of border ownership in human visual cortex is largely unknown. In this study, we designed two simple but compelling stimuli in which a slight change of contextual information could induce a dramatic change of border ownership. Using functional MRI adaptation, we found that border ownership selectivity in V2 was robust and reliable across subjects, and it was largely dependent on attention. Our study provides the first human evidence that V2 is a critical area for the processing of border ownership and that this processing depends on the modulation from higher-level cortical areas.

Key words: visual cortex; fMRI; vision; figure–ground segregation; attention; border ownership

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Received Sept. 26, 2008; revised Dec. 5, 2008; accepted Dec. 8, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Fang Fang, Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. Email: ffang{at}pku.edu.cn

Related articles in J. Neurosci.:

How Attention Affects Border Ownership in Early Visual Areas

Shruti Baijal
J. Neurosci. 2009 29: 6392-6393. [Full Text]  

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. Baijal How Attention Affects Border Ownership in Early Visual Areas J. Neurosci., May 20, 2009; 29(20): 6392 - 6393. [Full Text] [PDF]

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