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Visual synchrony affects binding and segmentation in perception

Nature volume 394, pages 179–182 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

The visual system analyses information by decomposing complex objects into simple components (visual features) that are widely distributed across the cortex1,2. When several objects are present simultaneously in the visual field, a mechanism is required to group (bind) together visual features that belong to each object and to separate (segment) them from features of other objects. An attractive scheme for binding visual features into a coherent percept consists of synchronizing the activity of their neural representations3,4,5,6. If synchrony is important in binding, one would expect that binding and segmentation are facilitated by visual displays that are temporally manipulated to induce stimulus-dependent synchrony. Here we show that visual grouping is indeed facilitated when elements of one percept are presented at the same time as each other and are temporally separated (on a scale below the integration time of the visual system7) from elements of another percept or from background elements. Our results indicate that binding is due to a global mechanism of grouping caused by synchronous neural activation, and not to a local mechanism of motion computation.

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Figure 1: Effects of temporal structure on grouping.
Figure 2: Effects of temporal structure on the detection of collinear target elements presented within a noisy background.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. Bonneh, E. Niebur and D. Sagi for discussions; N. Blue and A. Found for software assistance; and D. Vernon and Z. James for help in running experiments.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Kent at Canterbury, CP2 7NP, Kent, UK

    Marius Usher & Nick Donnelly

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  1. Marius Usher
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Correspondence to Marius Usher.

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Usher, M., Donnelly, N. Visual synchrony affects binding and segmentation in perception. Nature 394, 179–182 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28166

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