High-level Visual Processing Research Articles

Trait-level somatic anxiety modulates functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) neural synchrony to naturalistic stimuli.

Somatic anxiety refers to the tendency to appraise situations as threatening, leading to heightened physiological arousal. Symptoms associated with higher levels of somatic anxiety that reflect autonomic arousal and perceptions of threat include elevated heartbeat perception, difficulty breathing, and palpitation. Somatic anxiety is generally associated with increased stimulus-driven attention; however, it is currently unknown how somatic anxiety modulates neural synchrony, measured by intersubject correlations (ISC), in response to complex audiovisual stimuli. The present study seeks to identify how differing levels of somatic anxiety are associated with neural synchrony during psychological processing of audiovisual stimuli, as measured by ISC and intersubject representational similarity analyses. We hypothesize that individuals with higher levels of somatic anxiety will show heightened ISC in response to an audiovisual stimulus in regions associated with stimulus-driven attention, including the superior parietal lobule, supplementary motor area, and precentral gyrus. Results from this study identified that higher levels of somatic anxiety are associated with widespread heightened ISC across the brain, including in regions associated with perceptual processing and stimulus-driven attention. Taken together, this research suggests that higher levels of somatic anxiety are associated with similar processing in brain regions involved in stimulus-driven attention and top-down processing, whereas lower levels of somatic anxiety are associated with similar processing in brain regions associated with higher level visual processing. These results collectively emphasize that somatic anxiety levels should be measured and controlled for during naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigms, as this trait may have an influence on synchronous neurological activity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

High-density recording reveals sparse clusters (but not columns) for shape and texture encoding in macaque V4.

Macaque area V4 includes neurons that exhibit exquisite selectivity for visual form and surface texture, but their functional organization across laminae is unknown. We used high-density Neuropixels probes in two awake monkeys (one female and one male) to characterize shape and texture tuning of dozens of neurons simultaneously across layers. We found sporadic clusters of neurons that exhibit similar tuning for shape and texture: ∼20% exhibited similar tuning with their neighbors. Importantly, these clusters were confined to a few layers, seldom 'columnar' in structure. This was the case even when neurons were strongly driven, and exhibited robust contrast invariance for shape and texture tuning. We conclude that functional organization in area V4 is not columnar for shape and texture stimulus features and in general organization maybe at a coarser stimulus category scale (e.g. selectivity for stimuli with vs without 3D cues), and a coarser spatial scale (assessed by optical imaging), rather than at a fine scale in terms of similarity in single neuron tuning for specific features. We speculate that this may be a direct consequence of the great diversity of inputs integrated by V4 neurons to build variegated tuning manifolds in a high-dimensional space.Significance Statement In the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey, studies have demonstrated columnar functional organization, i.e. shared tuning across layers for stimulus orientation, spatial frequency, ocular dominance, etc. In mid and higher level visual form processing stages, where neurons exhibit high-dimensional tuning, functional organization has been harder to evaluate. Here, leveraging the use of the high-density Neuropixels probes to record simultaneously from dozens of neurons across cortical layers, we demonstrate that functional organization is not columnar for shape and texture tuning in area V4, a midlevel stage critical for form processing. Our results contribute to the debate about the functional significance of cortical columns providing support to the idea that they emerge due to one-to-many representational expansion.

Amodal completion across the brain: The impact of structure and knowledge.

This study investigates the phenomenon of amodal completion within the context of naturalistic objects, employing a repetition suppression paradigm to disentangle the influence of structure and knowledge cues on how objects are completed. The research focuses on early visual cortex (EVC) and lateral occipital complex (LOC), shedding light on how these brain regions respond to different completion scenarios. In LOC, we observed suppressed responses to structure and knowledge-compatible stimuli, providing evidence that both cues influence neural processing in higher-level visual areas. However, in EVC, we did not find evidence for differential responses to completions compatible or incompatible with either structural or knowledge-based expectations. Together, our findings suggest that the interplay between structure and knowledge cues in amodal completion predominantly impacts higher-level visual processing, with less pronounced effects on the early visual cortex. This study contributes to our understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying visual perception and highlights the distinct roles played by different brain regions in amodal completion.

Extraction of three-dimensional shapes in glaucoma patients in response to monocular depth cues.

To assess the impact of glaucoma on perceiving three-dimensional (3D) shapes based on monocular depth cues. Clinical observational study. Twenty glaucoma patients, subjected to binocular visual-field sensitivity (binocular-VFS) tests using a Humphrey Visual Field Analyzer, and 20 age-matched healthy volunteers, underwent two tasks: identifying the nearest vertex of a 3D shape using monocular shading (3D-SfS), texture (3D-SfT), or motion (3D-SfM) cues, and distinguishing elementary one-dimensional (1D) features of these cues. The association of the visual-field index (VFI) of binocular-VFS with 3D shape perception in glaucoma patients was also examined. Glaucoma patients demonstrated reduced accuracy in distinguishing 1D luminance brightness and a larger "error-in-depth" between the perceived and actual depths for 3D-SfM and 3D-SfS compared to healthy volunteers. Six glaucoma patients with a 100% VFI for binocular-VFS exhibited a similar error-in-depth to the other fourteen glaucoma patients; they had a larger error-in-depth for 3D-SfM compared to healthy volunteers. No correlation between the error-in-depth values and the VFI values of binocular-VFS was observed. The 3D shape perception in glaucoma patients varies based on the depth cue's characteristics. Impaired 1D discrimination and larger thresholds for 3D-SfM in glaucoma patients with a 100% VFI for binocular-VFS indicate more pronounced perceptual deficits of lower-level elementary features for 3D-SfS and higher-level visual processing of 3D shapes for 3D-SfM. The effects of the location and degree of binocular visual-field defects on 3D shape perception remain to be elucidated. Our research provides insights into the 3D shape extraction mechanism in glaucoma.

Probing the Bottleneck of Awareness Formed by Foveal Crowding: A Neurophysiological Study.

Crowding occurs when an easily identified isolated stimulus is surrounded by stimuli with similar properties, making it very difficult to identify. Crowding is suggested as a mechanism that creates a bottleneck in object recognition and awareness. Recently, we showed that brief presentation times at the fovea resulted in a significant crowding effect on target identification, impaired the target's color awareness, and resulted in a slower reaction time. However, when tagging the target with a red letter, the crowding effect is abolished. Crowding is widely considered a grouping; hence, it is pre-attentive. An event-related potential (ERP) study that investigated the spatial-temporal properties of crowding suggested the involvement of higher-level visual processing. Here, we investigated whether ERP's components may be affected by crowding and tagging, and whether the temporal advantage of ERP can be utilized to gain further information about the crowding mechanism. The participants reported target identification using our standard foveal crowing paradigm. It is assumed that crowding occurs due to a suppressive effect; thus, it can be probed by changes in perceptual (N1, ~160 ms) and attentive (P3 ~300-400 ms) components. We found a suppression effect (less negative ERP magnitude) in N1 under foveal crowding, which was recovered under tagging conditions. ERP's amplitude components (N1 and P3) and the behavioral proportion correct are highly correlated. These findings suggest that crowding is an early grouping mechanism that may be combined with later processing involving the segmentation mechanism.

Multiple mechanisms of visual prediction as revealed by the timecourse of scene-object facilitation.

Not only semantic, but also recently learned arbitrary associations have the potential to facilitate visual processing in everyday life-for example, knowledge of a (moveable) object's location at a specific time may facilitate visual processing of that object. In our prior work, we showed that previewing a scene can facilitate processing of recently associated objects at the level of visual analysis (Smith and Federmeier in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(5):783-803, 2020). In the current study, we assess how rapidly this facilitation unfolds by manipulating scene preview duration. We then compare our results to studies using well-learned object-scene associations in a first-pass assessment of whether systems consolidation might speed up high-level visual prediction. In two ERP experiments (N = 60), we had participants study categorically organized novel object-scene pairs in an explicit paired associate learning task. At test, we varied contextual pre-exposure duration, both between (200 vs. 2500 ms) and within subjects (0-2500 ms). We examined the N300, an event-related potential component linked to high-level visual processing of objects and scenes and found that N300 effects of scene congruity increase with longer scene previews, up to approximately 1-2 s. Similar results were obtained for response times and in a separate component-neutral ERP analysis of visual template matching. Our findings contrast with prior evidence that scenes can rapidly facilitate visual processing of commonly associated objects. This raises the possibility that systems consolidation might mediate different kinds of predictive processing with different temporal profiles.

Influence of visual acuity on monocular face perception and exploration: Evidence from gaze‐contingency

Aims/Purpose: The remarkable ability of the human brain to identify faces has traditionally been divided in the scientific literature into relative contribution of an analytical versus a holistic way of processing the visual stimuli. Although the “part‐by‐part” analysis allows identification, previous studies have proven that the ability to perceive all parts in a simultaneous fashion seems to be the key element of what makes observers experts at face identification. Here, we aim to better understand the impact of visual acuity (VA) on the holistic and analytical processing of the face.Methods: We performed face‐matching tasks of unfamiliar faces using a gaze‐contingency approach in 12 normally sighted adults. Three viewing conditions (full view, mask effect, window effect) were simulated while VA was artificially decreased using a blur technique to obtain a linear scale of VA from LogMar 1,3 to 0,3.Results: At the group level, response times and number of fixations in full view, mask effect and window effect remained well preserved at VA as low as LogMar 1,0. Around that level of VA, both time and number of fixations increased with decreasing VA and were higher in the mask condition than in the other conditions.Conclusions: Facial identification performances remain well preserved at low VA. Evolution has allowed the brain to identify faces even if pathologies affecting the visual pathways strongly limit VA. This probably derives from the holistic strategy for face identification and the involvement of brain areas specialized in high level visual processing.

Brain Representation of Animal and Non-Animal Images in Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease.

In early Alzheimer's disease (AD), high-level visual functions and processing speed are impacted. Few functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated high-level visual deficits in AD, yet none have explored brain activity patterns during rapid animal/non-animal categorization tasks. To address this, we utilized the previously known Integrated Cognitive Assessment (ICA) to collect fMRI data and compare healthy controls (HC) to individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild AD. The ICA encompasses a rapid visual categorization task that involves distinguishing between animals and non-animals within natural scenes. To comprehensively explore variations in brain activity levels and patterns, we conducted both univariate and multivariate analyses of fMRI data. The ICA task elicited activation across a range of brain regions, encompassing the temporal, parietal, occipital, and frontal lobes. Univariate analysis, which compared responses to animal versus non-animal stimuli, showed no significant differences in the regions of interest (ROIs) across all groups, with the exception of the left anterior supramarginal gyrus in the HC group. In contrast, multivariate analysis revealed that in both HC and MCI groups, several regions could differentiate between animals and non-animals based on distinct patterns of activity. Notably, such differentiation was absent within the mild AD group. Our study highlights the ICA task's potential as a valuable cognitive assessment tool designed for MCI and AD. Additionally, our use of fMRI pattern analysis provides valuable insights into the complex changes in brain function associated with AD. This approach holds promise for enhancing our understanding of the disease's progression.

How do drivers mitigate the effects of naturalistic visual complexity?

How do the limits of high-level visual processing affect human performance in naturalistic, dynamic settings of (multimodal) interaction where observers can draw on experience to strategically adapt attention to familiar forms of complexity? In this backdrop, we investigate change detection in a driving context to study attentional allocation aimed at overcoming environmental complexity and temporal load. Results indicate that visuospatial complexity substantially increases change blindness but also that participants effectively respond to this load by increasing their focus on safety-relevant events, by adjusting their driving, and by avoiding non-productive forms of attentional elaboration, thereby also controlling “looked-but-failed-to-see” errors. Furthermore, analyses of gaze patterns reveal that drivers occasionally, but effectively, limit attentional monitoring and lingering for irrelevant changes. Overall, the experimental outcomes reveal how drivers exhibit effective attentional compensation in highly complex situations. Our findings uncover implications for driving education and development of driving skill-testing methods, as well as for human-factors guided development of AI-based driving assistance systems.

Musically induced microvalences in high-level visual processing of everyday scenes

Musically induced microvalences in high-level visual processing of everyday scenes

Brain structure variability study in pilots based on VBM.

The impact of occupations on brain structures has attracted considerable research interests in the last decade. The aim of this research is to find the effect of flight training on brain gray matter volume of pilots. The whole-brain structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data collected from 26 pilots and 24 controls was analyzed using Voxel-based morphological analysis method (VBM) combined with T1 data to quantitatively detect the local gray matter of brain tissue and calculate the gray matter volume. The result shows that the pilot group has larger gray matter volume in the lingual gyrus and fusiform gyrus compared to the control group (P<0.05). Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between the gray matter volume and the number of flight hours (r = 0.426, P = 0.048) after studying the average gray matter volume value of the agglomerate of participants whose flight hours are between 0 and 1000 hours. The lingual gyrus and fusiform gyrus are involved in high-level visual processing, memory, multisensory integration and perception. The study has indicated the flight training could enlarge gray matter volume in the lingual gyrus and fusiform gyrus. During flying, pilots need to observe the instrumentation in the cockpit and fully interpret the readings, which may lead to the results.

Changes in face category induce stronger duration distortion in the temporal oddball paradigm

A novel stimulus embedded in a sequence of repeated stimuli is often perceived to be longer in duration. Studies have indicated the involvement of repetition suppression in this duration distortion, but it remains unclear which processing stages are important. The present study examined whether high-level visual category processing contributes to the oddball’s duration distortion. In Experiment 1, we presented a novel face image in either human, monkey, or cat category after a repetition of an identical human face image in the temporal oddball paradigm. We found that the duration distortion of the last stimulus increased when the face changed across different categories, than when it changed within the same category. However, the effect of category change disappeared when globally scrambled and locally scrambled face images were used in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively, suggesting that the difference in duration distortion cannot be attributed to low-level visual properties of the images. Furthermore, in Experiment 4, we again used intact face images and found that category changes can influence the duration distortion even when a series of different human faces was presented before the last stimulus. These findings indicate that high-level visual category processing plays an important role in the duration distortion of oddballs. This study supports the idea that visual processing at higher visual stages is involved in duration perception. (219 words)

Perceptual Grouping During Binocular Rivalry in Mild Glaucoma.

PurposeThis study tested perceptual grouping during binocular rivalry to probe the strength of neural connectivity of the visual cortex involved in early visual processing in patients with mild glaucoma.MethodsSeventeen patients with mild glaucoma with no significant visual field defects and 14 healthy controls participated. Rivalry stimuli were 1.8°-diameter discs, containing horizontal or vertical sine-wave gratings, viewed dichoptically. To test the grouping, two spatially separated identical stimuli were presented eccentrically to the same or different eyes and to the same or different hemifields. The outcome measures were the time of exclusive dominance of the grouped percept (i.e., percept with synchronized orientations), the rivalry rate, and the epochs of exclusive dominance.ResultsFor both groups, the grouping occurred primarily for the matching orientations in the same eye/same hemifield (MO SE/SH) and for the matching orientations in the same eye/different hemifield (MO SE/DH) conditions. Time dominance of the grouped percept of the glaucoma group was similar to that of the control group in all conditions. The rivalry rates in the MO SE/SH and MO SE/DH conditions were significantly larger in the control group than in the glaucoma group. The epochs of exclusive dominance of the grouped percept in the MO SE/SH condition were a median of 48-ms longer for the control group, but a median of 116-ms shorter for the glaucoma group when compared to those in the MO SE/DH condition.ConclusionPatients with mild glaucoma show clear impairments in binocular rivalry while evidence for deficits in perceptual grouping could be inferred only indirectly. If these deficits truly exist, they may have implications for higher levels of visual processing, such as object recognition and scene segmentation, but these predictions remain to be tested in future studies.

Chapter 10 - Visual objects and their colors

The ventral temporal cortex hosts key regions for the high-level visual processing of object shape and color. These areas represent nodes of large-scale neural circuits dedicated to object recognition. In the language-dominant hemisphere, some of these regions communicate with the language systems; by assigning verbal labels to percepts, these circuits speedup stimulus categorization, and permit fast and accurate interindividual communication. By impairing the functioning of these circuits, neurological damage may provoke disabling disorders of the processing of visual objects and of their colors. Brain damage of vascular, degenerative, toxic, or traumatic origin can induce deficits at different levels of visual processing, from the building of shape- or wavelength-invariant percepts, to their connections with semantic knowledge and with the appropriate lexical entry. After an overview of the neuroimaging of domain-preferring regions for object shape and color in the ventral temporal cortex, this chapter reviews evidence from historical and recent cases of acquired visual agnosia and color processing deficits. A recurrent motif emerging from patients' patterns of performance and lesion locations is the existence of caudo-rostral gradients in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, spanning from more perceptual to more cognitive stages of processing.

Using deep neural networks to model similarity between visual patterns: Application to fish sexual signals

The evolution of visual patterns is a frontier in the theory of sexual selection as we seek to understand the function of complex visual patterning in courtship. Recently, the sensory drive and sensory bias models of sexual selection have been applied to higher-level visual processing. One prediction of this application is that animals' sexual signals will mimic the visual statistics of their habitats. An enduring difficulty of testing predictions of visual pattern evolution is in developing quantitative methods for comparing patterns. Advances in artificial neural networks address this challenge by allowing for the direct comparison of images using both simple and complex features. Here, we use VGG19, an industry‑leading image classification network to test predictions of sensory drive, by comparing visual patterns in darter fish (Etheostoma spp.) to images of their habitats. We find that images of female darters are significantly more similar to images of their habitat than are images of males, supporting a role of camouflage in female patterning. We do not find direct evidence for sensory drive shaping the design of male patterns; however, this work demonstrates the utility of network methods for pattern analysis and suggests future directions for visual pattern research.

Eye Direction Detection and Perception as Premises of a Social Brain: A Narrative Review of Behavioral and Neural Data.

The eyes and the gaze are important stimuli for social interaction in humans. Impaired recognition of facial identity, facial emotions, and inference of the intentions of others may result from difficulties in extracting information relevant to the eye region, mainly the direction of gaze. Therefore, a review of these data is of interest. Behavioral data demonstrating the importance of the eye region and how humans respond to gaze direction are reviewed narratively, and several theoretical models on how visual information on gaze is processed are discussed to propose a unified hypothesis. Several issues that have not yet been investigated are identified. The authors tentatively suggest experiments that might help progress research in this area. The neural aspects are subsequently reviewed to best describe the low-level and higher-level visual information processing stages in the targeted subcortical and cortical areas. A specific neural network is proposed on the basis of the literature. Various gray areas, such as the temporality of the processing of visual information, the question of salience priority, and the coordination between the two hemispheres, remain unclear and require further investigations. Finally, disordered gaze direction detection mechanisms and their consequences on social cognition and behavior are discussed as key deficiencies in several conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder, 22q11.2 deletion, schizophrenia, and social anxiety disorder. This narrative review provides significant additional data showing that the detection and perception of someone's gaze is an essential part of the development of our social brain.

Attention and prediction modulations in expected and unexpected visuospatial trajectories.

Humans are constantly exposed to a rich tapestry of visual information in a potentially changing environment. To cope with the computational burden this engenders, our perceptual system must use prior context to simultaneously prioritise stimuli of importance and suppress irrelevant surroundings. This study investigated the influence of prediction and attention in visual perception by investigating event-related potentials (ERPs) often associated with these processes, N170 and N2pc for prediction and attention, respectively. A contextual trajectory paradigm was used which violated visual predictions and neglected to predetermine areas of spatial interest, to account for the potentially unpredictable nature of a real-life visual scene. Participants (N = 36) viewed a visual display of cued and non-cued shapes rotating in a five-step predictable trajectory, with the fifth and final position of either the cued or non-cued shape occurring in a predictable or unpredictable spatial location. To investigate the predictive coding theory of attention we used factors of attention and prediction, whereby attention was manipulated as either cued or non-cued conditions, and prediction manipulated in either predictable or unpredictable conditions. Results showed both enhanced N170 and N2pc amplitudes to unpredictable compared to predictable stimuli. Stimulus cueing status also increased N170 amplitude, but this did not interact with stimulus predictability. The N2pc amplitude was not affected by stimulus cueing status. In accordance with previous research these results suggest the N170 is in part a visual prediction error response with respect to higher-level visual processes, and furthermore the N2pc may index attention reorientation. The results demonstrate prior context influences the sensitivity of the N170 and N2pc electrophysiological responses. These findings add further support to the role of N170 as a prediction error signal and suggest that the N2pc may reflect attentional reorientation in response to unpredicted stimulus locations.

Self-reported perceptual aberrations in psychosis map to event-related potentials and semantic appraisals of objects.

Psychotic disorders have been associated with visual deficits and deviant semantic processing, making it unclear whether object detection abnormalities in psychosis originate from low-level or higher-order visual processes. The current study investigated how high-level visual processing is affected in psychosis by presenting object stimuli with equivalent low-level visual features. Outpatients with affective and nonaffective psychotic disorders, first-degree biological relatives, and psychiatrically unaffected individuals (N = 130) completed the Fragmented Ambiguous Object Task (FAOT) to assess recognition of objects in ambiguous stimuli. During the task, we recorded electroencephalography, quantified event-related potential (ERP) components (P1, N1, negative closure [NCL], N400), and derived four spatiotemporal event-related potential factors using principal components analysis (PCA). In addition to traditional diagnoses, psychosis was characterized using a dimensional measure of individual differences in self-reported sensory experiences (perceptual absorption) calculated from scales that tap the psychotic domain of the hierarchical structure of psychopathology. Rates of detecting objects within fragmented stimuli failed to differ across diagnostic groups or significantly predict perceptual absorption (p = .057). PCA factors that reflected smaller N1 and larger NCL amplitudes were associated with detecting objects. Exploratory analyses revealed that higher perceptual absorption was associated with reductions in the N400 and a late positive PCA factor. Although early and midlatency brain responses modulate during object detection, late brain responses tied to semantic appraisal of objects are related to perceptual aberrations often reported by individuals with severe psychopathology. Dimensional measures of personality appear sensitive to variation in biological systems relevant to psychotic symptomatology and object perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural Taskonomy: Explaining high-level visual processing of natural scenes using task-derived representations

Neural Taskonomy: Explaining high-level visual processing of natural scenes using task-derived representations

Inhibiting saccades to hands: High-level visual processes modulate oculomotor control

Inhibiting saccades to hands: High-level visual processes modulate oculomotor control