Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST), 16846-13114 Narmak, Tehran, Iran; School of Cognitive Sciences (SCS), Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran; Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Goettingen, Germany.
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Goettingen, Germany; Functional Imaging Laboratory, German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Goettingen, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2021 Apr 1;229:117757. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117757. Epub 2021 Jan 15.
We effortlessly perceive visual objects as unified entities, despite the preferential encoding of their various visual features in separate cortical areas. A 'binding' process is assumed to be required for creating this unified percept, but the underlying neural mechanism and specific brain areas are poorly understood. We investigated 'feature-binding' across two feature dimensions, using a novel stimulus configuration, designed to disambiguate whether a given combination of color and motion direction is perceived as bound or unbound. In the "bound" condition, two behaviorally relevant features (color and motion) belong to the same object, while in the "unbound" condition they belong to different objects. We recorded local field potentials from the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) in macaque monkeys that actively monitored the different stimulus configurations. Our data show a neural representation of visual feature binding especially in the 4-12 Hz frequency band and a transmission of binding information between different lPFC neural subpopulations. This information is linked to the animal's reaction time, suggesting a behavioral relevance of the binding information. Together, our results document the involvement of the prefrontal cortex, targeted by the dorsal and ventral visual streams, in binding visual features from different dimensions, in a process that includes a dynamic modulation of low frequency inter-regional communication.
我们毫不费力地将视觉对象视为统一的实体，尽管它们的各种视觉特征优先在分离的皮质区域中被编码。假设需要进行一个“绑定”过程来创建这种统一的感知，但潜在的神经机制和特定的大脑区域还了解甚少。我们使用一种新颖的刺激配置来研究跨两个特征维度的“特征绑定”，该配置旨在消除给定的颜色和运动方向组合是被感知为绑定还是未绑定。在“绑定”条件下，两个行为相关的特征（颜色和运动）属于同一个物体，而在“未绑定”条件下，它们属于不同的物体。我们从猕猴的外侧前额叶皮层（lPFC）记录了局部场电位，猕猴主动监测不同的刺激配置。我们的数据显示了视觉特征绑定的神经表示，特别是在 4-12 Hz 的频率带中，以及不同 lPFC 神经亚群之间绑定信息的传递。该信息与动物的反应时间有关，表明绑定信息具有行为相关性。总之，我们的结果记录了前额叶皮层（由背侧和腹侧视觉流靶向）参与来自不同维度的视觉特征的绑定，这是一个包括低频区域间通信动态调制的过程。
