Nature Neuroscience
8, 1248 - 1254 (2005)
Published online: 7 August 2005; | doi:10.1038/nn1518
Filling-in of visual phantoms in the human brainMing Meng1, David A Remus1
& Frank Tong21
Psychology Department, Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA. 2
Psychology Department, 301 Wilson Hall, Vanderbilt University, 111 21st Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee 37203, USA.
Correspondence should be addressed to Ming Meng mmeng@mit.edu The constructive nature of perception can be demonstrated under viewing conditions that lead to vivid subjective impressions in the absence of direct input. When a low-contrast moving grating is divided by a large gap, observers report seeing a 'visual phantom' of the real grating extending through the blank gap region. Here, we report fMRI evidence showing that visual phantoms lead to enhanced activity in early visual areas that specifically represent the blank gap region. We found that neural filling-in effects occurred automatically in areas V1 and V2, regardless of where the subject attended. Moreover, when phantom-inducing gratings were paired with competing stimuli in a binocular rivalry display, subjects reported spontaneous fluctuations in conscious perception of the phantom accompanied by tightly coupled changes in early visual activity. Our results indicate that phantom visual experiences are closely linked to automatic filling-in of activity at the earliest stages of cortical processing.
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