Abstract
The process of perception requires not only the brain's receipt of sensory data but also the meaningful organization of that data in relation to the perceptual experience held in memory. Although it typically results in a conscious percept, the process of perception is not fully conscious. Research on the neural substrates of human visual perception has suggested that regions of limbic cortex, including the medial orbital frontal cortex (mOFC), may contribute to intuitive judgments about perceptual events, such as guessing whether an object might be present in a briefly presented fragmented drawing. Examining dense array measures of cortical electrical activity during a modified Waterloo Gestalt Closure Task, results show, as expected, that activity in medial orbital frontal electrical responses (about 250 ms) was associated with intuitive judgments. Activity in the right temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) region was found to predict mOFC (∼150 ms) activity and, in turn, was subsequently influenced by the mOFC at a later time (∼300 ms). The initial perception of gist or meaning of a visual stimulus in limbic networks may thus yield reentrant input to the visual areas to influence continued development of the percept. Before perception is completed, the initial representation of gist may support intuitive judgments about the ongoing perceptual process.
Highlights
A common view is that perception begins with input to sensory cortex, and continues with processing in visual association cortex to achieve the interpretation required for full perception
We encouraged them to use their feeling of whether or not an image contained a possible object. Given this instruction to guess at the presence of a possible object, participants were still relatively accurate, reporting that 65% of fragmented images contained a possible object compared to 14% for scrambled images
reaction time (RT) associated with hits and correct rejections were much faster than those associated with misses and false alarms, respectively
Summary
A common view is that perception begins with input to sensory cortex, and continues with processing in visual association cortex to achieve the interpretation required for full perception. Psychological studies of perception have suggested that memory operates early in the perceptual process, to bring both current expectancies and previous perceptual experience to the organization of sensory data into meaningful percepts [1,2,3]. Given the brain’s reentrant (i.e., back projecting) connectional architecture that links each sensory modality with unimodal association, heteromodal association, and limbic cortex [4], a reasonable hypothesis is that the process of perception requires the reentrant corticolimbic mechanisms of memory consolidation, linking the multiple networks of the corticolimbic hierarchy. Considering the multiple networks linked in the perceptual process, we can infer that some limited conscious access to the initial response in limbic networks is important to the feeling of knowing, and to the intuitive monitoring of the perceptual process. Because limbic networks organize the visceral, evaluative base of cognition [6,7], we can understand why the feeling of knowing is often affectively charged
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