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Neuronal synchrony does not represent texture segregation

Nature volume 396, pages 362–366 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

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 neuron1,2,3,4. 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 scene5,6,7,8,9,10. Experiments with stimuli such as moving bars or gratings have provided evidence for this hypothesis11,12,13,14,15,16. 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 synchronin V1 does not reflect the binding of features that leads to texture segregation.

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Figure 1: Illustrations (not replications) of the three types of figure–ground display used in this study.
Figure 2: Complementary stimulus pairs, responses and cross-correlograms.
Figure 3: Population synchrony.
Figure 4: Mean population synchrony, and synchrony for specific populations of pairs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank W. Singer, P. Roelfsema, K. Zipser and C. Van der Togt for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript; K. Brandsma and J. de Feiter for biotechnical support; and P. Brassinga and H. Meester for technical support. This work was supported by a grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) to V.A.F.L.

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  1. Department of Medical Physics, Graduate School Neurosciences Amsterdam, AMC, University of Amsterdam, and The Netherlands Ophthalmic Research Institute, PO Box 12141, 1100 AC, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Victor A. F. Lamme & Henk Spekreijse

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  1. Victor A. F. Lamme
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  2. Henk Spekreijse
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Correspondence to Victor A. F. Lamme.

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Lamme, V., Spekreijse, H. Neuronal synchrony does not represent texture segregation. Nature 396, 362–366 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/24608

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