A neural correlate of visual feature binding in primate lateral prefrontal cortex

Abstract

We effortlessly perceive visual objects as unified entities, despite the preferential encoding of their various visual features in separate cortical areas. A ‘binding’ process is assumed to be required for creating this unified percept, but the underlying neural mechanism and specific brain areas are poorly understood. We investigated ‘feature-binding’ across two feature dimensions, using a novel stimulus configuration, designed to disambiguate whether a given combination of color and motion direction is perceived as bound or unbound. In the “bound” condition, two behaviorally relevant features (color and motion) belong to the same object, while in the “unbound” condition they belong to different objects. We recorded local field potentials from the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) in macaque monkeys that actively monitored the different stimulus configurations. Our data show a neural representation of visual feature binding especially in the 4–12 Hz frequency band and a transmission of binding information between different lPFC neural subpopulations. This information is linked to the animal's reaction time, suggesting a behavioral relevance of the binding information. Together, our results document the involvement of the prefrontal cortex, targeted by the dorsal and ventral visual streams, in binding visual features from different dimensions, in a process that includes a dynamic modulation of low frequency inter-regional communication.