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Cortical responses to invisible objects in the human dorsal and ventral pathways

Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 1380–1385 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

The primate visual system is believed to comprise two main pathways: a ventral pathway for conscious perception and a dorsal pathway that can process visual information and guide action without accompanying conscious knowledge. Evidence for this theory has come primarily from studies of neurological patients and animals. Using fMRI, we show here that even though observers are completely unaware of test object images owing to interocular suppression, their dorsal cortical areas demonstrate substantial activity for different types of visual objects, with stronger responses to images of tools than of human faces. This result also suggests that in binocular rivalry, substantial information in the suppressed eye can escape the interocular suppression and reach dorsal cortex.

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Figure 1: Stimuli and procedure used in experiment 1.
Figure 2: Object-sensitive areas depicted on an inflated brain of a single subject.
Figure 3: Results from the first experiment showing time courses and the average BOLD signals (percentage change) from dorsal and ventral object sensitive areas in 'visible' (gray curves and bars) and 'invisible' (black curves and bars) conditions.
Figure 4: Results from the second experiment using images of tools and faces.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Murray, S. Cheung and Y. Jiang for their technical assistance and P. Costello for help with the manuscript. This research was supported by the James S. McDonnell foundation, the US National Institutes of Health and the University of Minnesota's Eva O. Miller Fellowship and Graduate Research Partnership Program Award.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis, 55455, Minnesota, USA

    Fang Fang & Sheng He

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  1. Fang Fang
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Correspondence to Sheng He.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

BOLD signal from ROIs in experiment 1. (PDF 179 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 2

BOLD signal from ROIs in experiment 2. (PDF 674 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Talairach coordinates of ROIs. (PDF 45 kb)

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Fang, F., He, S. Cortical responses to invisible objects in the human dorsal and ventral pathways. Nat Neurosci 8, 1380–1385 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1537

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