Abstract
A key question in understanding visual awareness is whether any single cortical area is indispensable. In a transcranial magnetic stimulation experiment, we show that observers' awareness of activity in extrastriate area V5 depends on the amount of activity in striate cortex (V1). From the timing and pattern of effects, we infer that back-projections from extrastriate cortex influence information content in V1, but it is V1 that determines whether that information reaches awareness.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a scholarship from the University College London Graduate School and grants from the UK Medical Research Council (A.C., N.L., V.W.) and the Wellcome Trust (V.W., A.C.). V.W. is supported by the Royal Society.
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Supplementary Notes
TMS stimulation of V5 and frontal eye fields. (PDF 17 kb)
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Silvanto, J., Cowey, A., Lavie, N. et al. Striate cortex (V1) activity gates awareness of motion. Nat Neurosci 8, 143–144 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1379
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1379
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