Neural dynamics of visual ambiguity resolution by perceptual prior
- New York University Langone Medical Center, United States
- Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract
Past experiences have enormous power in shaping our daily perception. Currently, dynamical neural mechanisms underlying this process remain mysterious. Exploiting a dramatic visual phenomenon, where a single experience of viewing a clear image allows instant recognition of a related degraded image, we investigated this question using MEG and 7 Tesla fMRI in humans. We observed that following the acquisition of perceptual priors, different degraded images are represented much more distinctly in neural dynamics starting from ~500 ms after stimulus onset. Content-specific neural activity related to stimulus-feature processing dominated within 300 ms after stimulus onset, while content-specific neural activity related to recognition processing dominated from 500 ms onward. Model-driven MEG-fMRI data fusion revealed the spatiotemporal evolution of neural activities involved in stimulus, attentional, and recognition processing. Together, these findings shed light on how experience shapes perceptual processing across space and time in the brain.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Carlos González-García
Funding
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
- Biyu J He
Klingenstein-Simons Neuroscience Fellowship
- Biyu J He
Department of State Fulbright program
- Carlos González-García
National Science Foundation (BCS-1753218)
- Biyu J He
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The experiment was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (under protocol #14-N-0002). All subjects provided written informed consent.
Copyright
© 2019, Flounders et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,171
- views
-
- 417
- downloads
-
- 43
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Neural dynamics of visual ambiguity resolution by perceptual prior
eLife 8:e41861.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.41861
