Pattern vision articles from across Nature Portfolio

The neural mechanisms underpinning visual illusions remains poorly understood. Here, the authors recorded the neural responses of mouse primary visual cortex to illusory grating and found delayed responses to illusory brightness, showing that optogenetic inhibition of higher visual areas reduced V1 response to illusions but not to real gratings.

In this Article, Ma et al. show, across a series of experiments, that time and memorability (the probability of recalling a visual stimulus) mutually influence one another, suggesting that time is a feature of visual processing that is intrinsic to perceptual experience.

How neural ensembles encode information remains poorly understood. Here, the authors identify “offsembles”—neurons that are specifically inactivated by sensory stimuli—which, when combined with “onsemble” neurons that are turned on by the stimulus, provide enhanced encoding power to the cortex.

An fMRI study of humans suggests the possibility of using data-driven and generative approaches to modulate macroscale brain regions’ activation responses and probe interindividual differences in and functional specialization of the human visual system.

Inputs to the central complex, the navigation center of Drosophila, are strongly modulated by the visual stimulus history. These history effects carry forward to bias turning behavior when flies choose between two visual stimuli.