Temporal Structure in the Input to Vision Can Promote Spatial Grouping

Blake, Randolph; Lee, Sang-Hun

doi:10.1007/3-540-45482-9_64

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Unlike most engineered communications systems that use well-defined frequencies to transmit information, biological systems often have to deal with unpredictable environmental events that occur within noisy backgrounds. Elsewhere we have conjectured that grouping from stochastic temporal structure is robust because stochastic change conveys more information and more effectively engages the biological machinery from which vision is crafted (Blake & Lee, 2000).…”

Section: Spatial Structure From Temporal Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Temporal Structure in Human Vision

Blake

Lee

2005

Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews

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Gestalt psychologists identified several stimulus properties thought to underlie visual grouping and figure/ground segmentation, and among those properties was common fate: the tendency to group together individual objects that move together in the same direction at the same speed. Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in visual grouping based on other time-dependent sources of visual information, including synchronized changes in luminance, in motion direction, and in figure/ ground relations. These various sources of temporal grouping information can be subsumed under the rubric temporal structure. In this article, the authors review evidence bearing on the effectiveness of temporal structure in visual grouping. They start with an overview of evidence bearing on temporal acuity of human vision, covering studies dealing with temporal integration and temporal differentiation. They then summarize psychophysical studies dealing with figure/ground segregation based on temporal phase differences in deterministic and stochastic events. The authors conclude with a brief discussion of neurophysiological implications of these results.

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Section: Spatial Structure From Temporal Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Temporal Structure in Human Vision

Blake

Lee

2005

Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews

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“…Our behavior therefore relies on constantly interpreting, updating and prioritizing the time-varying content, and thus the information embedded in the temporal structure of the continuous visual input stream. For instance, synchronicity of visual features contributes to the segmentation of scenes into objects and/or background (Alais, Blake, & Lee, 1998;Blake & Lee, 2000 and in extrapolating stimulus motion trajectories (Whitney, 2002) while compensating for neural latencies (Nijhawan, 1994). Consistency in the temporal structure of stimuli reduces reaction times and increases sensitivity to incoming stimuli by means of temporal expectation (Correa & Nobre, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial attention enhances cortical tracking of quasi-rhythmic visual stimuli

Tabarelli

Keitel

Groß

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Successfully interpreting and navigating our natural visual environment requires us to track its dynamics constantly. Additionally, we focus our attention on behaviorally relevant stimuli to enhance their neural processing. Little is known, however, about how sustained attention affects the ongoing tracking of stimuli with rich natural temporal dynamics. Here, we used MRI-informed source reconstructions of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data to map to what extent various cortical areas track concurrent continuous quasi-rhythmic visual stimulation. Further, we tested how top-down visuo-spatial attention influences this tracking process. Our bilaterally presented quasi-rhythmic stimuli covered a dynamic range of 4 -20Hz, subdivided into three distinct bands. As an experimental control, we also included strictly rhythmic stimulation (10 vs 12 Hz). Using a spectral measure of brain-stimulus coupling, we were able to track the neural processing of left vs. right stimuli independently, even while fluctuating within the same frequency range. The fidelity of neural tracking depended on the stimulation frequencies, decreasing for higher frequency bands. Both attended and non-attended stimuli were tracked beyond early visual cortices, in ventral and dorsal streams depending on the stimulus frequency. In general, tracking improved with the deployment of visuo-spatial attention to the stimulus location. Our results provide new insights into how human visual cortices process concurrent dynamic stimuli and provide a potential mechanism -namely increasing the temporal precision of tracking -for boosting the neural representation of attended input.

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