Cai Yongchun, Zhou Tiangang, Chen Lin
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Graduate University, Beijing, PR, China.
J Vis. 2008 Jul 18;8(9):9.1-10. doi: 10.1167/8.9.9.
The responses of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) are generally inhibited by stimuli surrounding their classical receptive fields (CRF). This surround suppression can influence the visual perception of stimuli. For instance, the presence of a surround stimulus can decrease the apparent contrast of a central stimulus. A recent neurophysiological study in nonhuman primates suggests that two distinct mechanisms, early and late mechanisms, give rise to surround suppression. Here, we used binocular suppression to render the surround stimuli invisible and evaluated the effects of this masking on the two types of surround suppression. We found that the early mechanism was unsusceptible to, whereas the late mechanism was eliminated by, binocular suppression. The distinct effects of binocular suppression on the early and late mechanisms suggest that the two types of surround suppression arise from different neural substrates.
初级视觉皮层（V1）中神经元的反应通常会受到其经典感受野（CRF）周围刺激的抑制。这种周围抑制会影响对刺激的视觉感知。例如，周围刺激的存在会降低中央刺激的表观对比度。最近一项针对非人类灵长类动物的神经生理学研究表明，早期和晚期这两种不同的机制会导致周围抑制。在这里，我们利用双眼抑制使周围刺激变得不可见，并评估这种掩蔽对两种周围抑制类型的影响。我们发现，早期机制对双眼抑制不敏感，而晚期机制则被双眼抑制消除。双眼抑制对早期和晚期机制的不同影响表明，这两种周围抑制类型源自不同的神经基质。
