Contrast-dependent responses in the human visual system: Childhood through adulthood

Zemon, Vance; Eisner, Wendy R.; Gordon, James; Grose-Fifer, Jillian; Tenedios, Felicia; Shoup, Harriet

doi:10.3109/00207459508986100

Cited by 39 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…Many other studies of human perception also reported a preference for black stimuli (Blackwell, 1946;Short, 1966;Krauskopf, 1980;Whittle, 1986;Bowen et al, 1989;Tyler and Chan, 1992;Kontsevich and Tyler, 1999;Dannemiller and Stephens, 2001). Such a bias for negative contrast has been observed also in physiological responses in human primary visual cortex V1: in the visual evoked potential (Zemon et al, 1988(Zemon et al, , 1995 and in fMRI (Olman et al, 2008). In a neurophysiological study, we found that single-cell activity in layer 2/3 of macaque V1 cortex showed stronger responses to black than to white stimuli (Yeh et al, 2009a).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Generation of Black-Dominant Responses in V1 Cortex

Xing

Yeh

Shapley³

2010

J. Neurosci.

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Consistent with human perceptual data, we found many more black-dominant than white-dominant responses in layer 2/3 neurons of the macaque primary visual cortex (V1). Seeking the mechanism of this black dominance of layer 2/3 neurons, we measured the laminar pattern of population responses (multiunit activity and local field potential) and found that a small preference for black is observable in early responses in layer 4C␤, the parvocellular-input layer, but not in the magnocellular-input layer 4C␣. Surprisingly, further analysis of the dynamics of black-white responses in layers 4C␤ and 2/3 suggested that black-dominant responses in layer 2/3 were not generated simply because of the weak black-dominant inputs from 4C␤. Instead, our results indicated the neural circuitry in V1 is wired with a preference to strengthen black responses. We hypothesize that this selective wiring could be due to (1) feedforward connectivity from black-dominant neurons in layer 4C to cells in layer 2/3 or (2) recurrent interactions between black-dominant neurons in layer 2/3, or a combination of both.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Generation of Black-Dominant Responses in V1 Cortex

Xing

Yeh

Shapley³

2010

J. Neurosci.

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“…4) in the input layer 4C and throughout V1. The evoked LFPs were complex in waveform (10), suggesting that the LFP reflected both excitatory and inhibitory synaptic activity, as has been suggested as an explanation for similarly complex waveforms of visually evoked EEG potentials (20). The large white-evoked LFP in layer 4C indicates that there was strong feed-forward ON input from the LGN and, therefore, that the weak whiteevoked MUA response (Figs.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…This finding is quite different from those in several previous studies that reported a general increase of response amplitude without changes of dynamics in V1 responses to small black vs. white stimuli. For instance, investigations of the visual cortex of human (20,34,35), monkey (8,17), and cat (36,37) reported an increase of response gain for small black targets but no change in response dynamics. Two possibilities might explain why our results on V1 dynamical states were not found in earlier experiments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortical brightness adaptation when darkness and brightness produce different dynamical states in the visual cortex

Xing

Yeh

Gordon

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Darkness and brightness are very different perceptually. To understand the neural basis for the visual difference, we studied the dynamical states of populations of neurons in macaque primary visual cortex when a spatially uniform area (8°× 8°) of the visual field alternated between black and white. Darkness evoked sustained nerve-impulse spiking in primary visual cortex neurons, but bright stimuli evoked only a transient response. A peak in the local field potential (LFP) γ band (30-80 Hz) occurred during darkness; white-induced LFP fluctuations were of lower amplitude, peaking at 25 Hz. However, the sustained response to white in the evoked LFP was larger than for black. Together with the results on spiking, the LFP results imply that, throughout the stimulus period, bright fields evoked strong net sustained inhibition. Such cortical brightness adaptation can explain many perceptual phenomena: interocular speeding up of dark adaptation, tonic interocular suppression, and interocular masking.ight adaptation is a vitally important visual function for enabling a stable perception of the visual world when background luminance levels can be as different as night and day. Previous psychophysical studies suggested that light adaptation was caused mainly by gain control mechanisms in the retina (1-3) that have been well studied (4). However, some psychophysical results suggested that there might be also a cortical contribution to light adaptation (5), but the nature of the cortical contribution is much less well understood. Here, we report our studies of cortical adaptation to brightness and darkness in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) and the implications for visual perception.We asked the following question: how does macaque V1 cortex respond to large dark and bright regions like those that would comprise the background of a visual scene during the night or the day, respectively? The experiments reported here focused on two cortical layers, 4C and 2/3. The layers of V1 are distinct stages of processing of visual signals (6, 7). The input layer 4C is the first cortical stage where the cortex could distinguish between blackness and whiteness (8). Layer 2/3 comprise one of the main visual outputs of V1 to extrastriate visual cortex (9). To obtain a comprehensive view of the response to black and white in cortical layers 4C and 2/3, we used measurements of population activity: multiunit spike rate, termed multiunit activity (MUA), and local field potential (LFP) (10-12).Cortical brightness adaptation was evident in the qualitatively different dynamics of neural population activity in layers 4C and 2/3 when the monkeys viewed black and white regions. Both black and white large-area stimuli evoked transient excitatory responses in MUA, but in response to a white region, there was a slowly developing but much stronger inhibition of spike activity. Such suppression of sustained spiking in cortical neurons by white backgrounds would increase the signal/noise ratio of targets on white backgrounds. Such cortical brightness a...

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“…Alternatively, amplitude decreases may result from increasing automaticity; the same processes require fewer resources, leading to a decrease in cerebral activation, a phenomenon that has been described in many developmental brain imaging studies (Durston and Casey, 2006). Latency changes across age have also been described (Allison et al, 1984;Zemon et al, 1995). Shorter P1 peak latency in adults than in children may reflect the increase in processing speed due to myelinisation (Picton and Taylor, 2007).…”

Section: P1-n1 Range: Pre-linguistic Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional and time-course changes in single word production from childhood to adulthood

et al. 2015

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Picture naming tasks are widely used both in children and adults to investigate language production for research and for assessment purposes. The main theoretical models of single word production based on the investigation of picture naming in adults provide a detailed account of the principal mental operations involved in the transformation of an abstract concept into articulated speech and their temporal dynamics. These models and in particular their time-course do not apply directly to children who display much longer production latencies than adults. Here we investigate the functional processes and the temporal dynamics of word encoding in school-age children and adults. ERPs were analysed from picture onset to the onset of articulation in 32 children and 32 adults performing the same overt picture naming task. Waveform analyses were not informative since differences appeared throughout the entire period, due to an early shift of waveform morphology and to larger amplitudes in children. However, when the sequences of periods of topographic stability were considered, different patterns of electric fields at scalp only appeared in approximately the first third of the analysed period, corresponding to the P1-N1 complex. From about 200 ms in adults and from 300 ms in children to articulation onset similar patterns of global topography were observed across groups but with a different time distribution. These results indicate qualitative changes in an early time-window, likely corresponding to pre-linguistic processes, and only quantitative changes in later time-windows, suggesting similar mental operations underlying lexical processes between age-school children and adults, with temporal dynamic changes during development.

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Contrast-dependent responses in the human visual system: Childhood through adulthood

Cited by 39 publications

References 66 publications

Generation of Black-Dominant Responses in V1 Cortex

Generation of Black-Dominant Responses in V1 Cortex

Cortical brightness adaptation when darkness and brightness produce different dynamical states in the visual cortex

Functional and time-course changes in single word production from childhood to adulthood

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