Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology, College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QB, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Nov 16;107(46):20099-103. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1000233107. Epub 2010 Nov 1.
Even within the early sensory areas, the majority of the input to any given cortical neuron comes from other cortical neurons. To extend our knowledge of the contextual information that is transmitted by such lateral and feedback connections, we investigated how visually nonstimulated regions in primary visual cortex (V1) and visual area V2 are influenced by the surrounding context. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and pattern-classification methods to show that the cortical representation of a nonstimulated quarter-field carries information that can discriminate the surrounding visual context. We show further that the activity patterns in these regions are significantly related to those observed with feed-forward stimulation and that these effects are driven primarily by V1. These results thus demonstrate that visual context strongly influences early visual areas even in the absence of differential feed-forward thalamic stimulation.
即使在早期的感觉区域内，任何给定的皮质神经元的大多数输入也来自其他皮质神经元。为了扩展我们对通过这种侧部和反馈连接传输的上下文信息的了解，我们研究了初级视觉皮层（V1）和视觉区域 V2 中的非视觉刺激区域如何受到周围环境的影响。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和模式分类方法表明，非刺激四分之一视野的皮质代表携带可以区分周围视觉环境的信息。我们进一步表明，这些区域的活动模式与前馈刺激观察到的模式显著相关，并且这些影响主要由 V1 驱动。因此，这些结果表明，即使在没有差异的丘脑前馈刺激的情况下，视觉环境也会强烈影响早期视觉区域。
