Lamme V A, Spekreijse H
Graduate School Neurosciences Amsterdam, AMC, Department of Medical Physics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Nature. 1998 Nov 26;396(6709):362-6. doi: 10.1038/24608.
The visual environment is perceived as an organized whole of objects and their surroundings. In many visual cortical areas, however, neurons are typically activated when a stimulus is presented over a very limited portion of the visual field, the receptive field of that neuron. To bridge the gap between this piecewise neuronal analysis and our global visual percepts, it has been postulated that neurons representing elements of the same object fire in synchrony to represent the perceptual organization of a scene. Experiments with stimuli such as moving bars or gratings have provided evidence for this hypothesis. We have further tested this by presenting monkeys with various textured scenes consisting of a figure on a background, and recorded neuronal activity in the primary visual cortex (area V1). Our results show no systematic relationship between the synchrony of firing of pairs of neurons and the perceptual organization of the scene. Instead, pairs of recording sites representing elements of the same figure most commonly showed equal amounts of synchrony between them as did pairs of which one site represented the figure and the other the background. We conclude that synchrony in V1 does not reflect the binding of features that leads to texture segregation.
视觉环境被视为由物体及其周围环境构成的有组织的整体。然而，在许多视觉皮层区域，当刺激出现在视野中非常有限的部分（即该神经元的感受野）时，神经元通常会被激活。为了弥合这种分段神经元分析与我们的整体视觉感知之间的差距，有人提出，代表同一物体元素的神经元会同步放电，以呈现场景的感知组织。使用诸如移动条纹或光栅等刺激进行的实验为这一假设提供了证据。我们通过向猴子呈现由背景上的图形组成的各种纹理场景，并记录初级视觉皮层（V1区）的神经元活动，进一步对此进行了测试。我们的结果表明，神经元对的放电同步性与场景的感知组织之间没有系统的关系。相反，代表同一图形元素的记录位点对之间的同步量，与其中一个位点代表图形而另一个位点代表背景的位点对之间的同步量通常相同。我们得出结论，V1区的同步性并不反映导致纹理分离的特征绑定。
