Areas V1 and V2 of the visual cortex have traditionally been conceived as stages of local feature representations. We investigated whether neural responses carry information about how local features belong to objects. Single-cell activity was recorded in areas V1, V2, and V4 of awake behaving monkeys. Displays were used in which the same local feature (contrast edge or line) could be presented as part of different figures. For example, the same light-dark edge could be the left side of a dark square or the right side of a light square. Each display was also presented with reversed contrast.We found significant modulation of responses as a function of the side of the figure in Ͼ50% of neurons of V2 and V4 and in 18% of neurons of the top layers of V1. Thus, besides the local contrast border information, neurons were found to encode the side to which the border belongs ("border ownership coding"). A majority of these neurons coded border ownership and the local polarity of luminance-chromaticity contrast. The others were insensitive to contrast polarity. Another 20% of the neurons of V2 and V4, and 48% of top layer V1, coded local contrast polarity, but not border ownership. The border ownership-related response differences emerged soon (Ͻ25 msec) after the response onset. In V2 and V4, the differences were found to be nearly independent of figure size up to the limit set by the size of our display (21°). Displays that differed only far outside the conventional receptive field could produce markedly different responses. When tested with more complex displays in which figure-ground cues were varied, some neurons produced invariant border ownership signals, others failed to signal border ownership for some of the displays, but neurons that reversed signals were rare.The influence of visual stimulation far from the receptive field center indicates mechanisms of global context integration. The short latencies and incomplete cue invariance suggest that the border-ownership effect is generated within the visual cortex rather than projected down from higher levels.

Chemical and physical damage to DNA can cause mutations and ultimately cancer, cardiovascular disease, aging, and other diseases (1-4). This damage can result from endogenous agents or exogenous chemicals. Many types of damage are known, and the biological effects can vary considerably. One of the prominent types of damage is alkylation at the O-6 atom of guanine (5, 6). O 6 -AlkylG 4 lesions are some of the more mutagenic lesions formed from DNA-alkylating agents (5, 7). The ability of O 6 -alkylG adducts to cause mutations has been demonstrated directly in site-specific mutagenesis experiments with defined adducts (8 -12). Further support for the view that these are deleterious species derives from the existence of specific DNA repair systems for this type of damage in almost all species, ranging from most bacteria to humans (13,14).Different alkylating agents form O 6 -alkylG adducts, and structure-activity relationships are important for understanding the basic mechanisms of how DNA polymerases function as well as issues such as carcinogenesis. Ϫ and HIV-1 RT (16) and by others with several DNA polymerases, mostly bacterial (7,17,18). Some of the more significant conclusions with pol T7Ϫ and HIV-1 RT were that the bulk of the adduct at the O-6 atom had an inhibitory effect and that an inactive polymerase-oligonucleotide complex is in equilibrium with the functional form (16,19).Studies with pol T7 Ϫ and HIV-1 RT indicated that the effect of size at the N-2 atom is more severe than at the O-6 atom (16, * This work was supported in part by United States Public Health Service Grants R01 CA059887, R01 CA115309 (to L. A. P.), R01 ES010375, and P30 ES000267 (to F. P. G.). The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact. □ S The on-line version of this article (available at http://www.jbc.org) contains a MALDI-TOF mass spectrum and capillary gel electrophoresis analysis of the O 6 -PobG 36-mer, an electrophoretic gel showing the lack of extension of an O 6 -PobG:G mispair by pol , and mass spectral analyses used to obtain the results shown in Fig. 7 4 The generic term "alkyl" is used to include both alkyl and aralkyl (Bz) groups for convenience. 5 The abbreviations used are: Bz, benzyl; CID, collision-induced dissociation; dCTP␣S, 2Ј-deoxycytidine 5Ј-O-(1-thiotriphosphate); DTT, dithiothreitol; ESI, electrospray ionization; LC-MS/MS, liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry; MALDI-TOF, matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization/time-of-flight; MS, mass spectrometry; Pob, 4-oxo-4-(3-pyridyl)butyl; PCNA, proliferating cell nuclear antigen; pol, (DNA) polymerase; pol T7 Ϫ , bacteriophage pol T7 exonuclease-deficient; RT, reverse transcriptase; UDG, uracil DNA glycosylase; HIV-1, human immunodeficiency virus, type 1.

Psychophysical studies indicate that perception of the colour and brightness of a surface depends on neural signals evoked by the borders of the surface rather than its interior. The visual cortex emphasizes contrast borders, but it is unclear whether colour surface signals also exist, whether colour border signals are orientation selective or mainly non-oriented, and whether cortical processing tends to separate colour and form information. To address these questions we examined the representation of uniform colour figures by recording single neuron activity from areas V1 and V2 in alert macaque monkeys during behaviourally induced fixation. Three aspects of coding were quantified: colour, orientation and edge selectivity. The occurrence of colour selectivity was not correlated with orientation or edge selectivity. The fraction of colour-selective cells was the same (64 % in layers 2 and 3 of V1, 45 % in V2) for oriented and non-oriented cells, and for edge-selective and surface-responsive cells. Oriented cells were often highly selective in colour space, and about 40 % of them were selective for edge polarity or border ownership. Thus, contrary to the idea of feature maps, colour, orientation and edge polarity are multiplexed in cortical signals. The results from V2 were similar to those from upper-layer V1, indicating that cortical processing does not strive to separate form and colour information. Oriented cells were five times more frequent than non-oriented cells. Thus, the vast majority of colour-coded cells are orientation tuned. Based on response profiles across a 4 deg square figure, and the relative frequency of oriented and non-oriented cells, we estimate that the cortical colour signal is 5-6 times stronger for the edges than for the surface of the figure. The frequency of oriented colour cells and their ability to code edge polarity indicate that these cells play a major role in the representation of surface colour.

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In this paper, we present an example-based system for terrain synthesis. In our approach, patches from a sample terrain (represented by a height field) are used to generate a new terrain. The synthesis is guided by a user-sketched feature map that specifies where terrain features occur in the resulting synthetic terrain. Our system emphasizes large-scale curvilinear features (ridges and valleys) because such features are the dominant visual elements in most terrains. Both the example height field and user's sketch map are analyzed using a technique from the field of geomorphology. The system finds patches from the example data that match the features found in the user's sketch. Patches are joined together using graph cuts and Poisson editing. The order in which patches are placed in the synthesized terrain is determined by breadth-first traversal of a feature tree and this generates improved results over standard raster-scan placement orders. Our technique supports user-controlled terrain synthesis in a wide variety of styles, based upon the visual richness of real-world terrain data.