Feedback contribution to surface motion perception in the human early visual cortex
- Maastricht University, Netherlands
- University Health Network, Canada
Abstract
Human visual surface perception has neural correlates in early visual cortex, but the role of feedback during surface segmentation in human early visual cortex remains unknown. Feedback projections preferentially enter superficial and deep anatomical layers, which provides a hypothesis for the cortical depth distribution of fMRI activity related to feedback. Using ultra-high field fMRI, we report a depth distribution of activation in line with feedback during the (illusory) perception of surface motion. Our results fit with a signal re-entering in superficial depths of V1, followed by a feedforward sweep of the re-entered information through V2 and V3. The magnitude and sign of the BOLD response strongly depended on the presence of texture in the background, and was additionally modulated by the presence of illusory motion perception compatible with feedback. In summary, the present study demonstrates the potential of depth-resolved fMRI in tackling biomechanical questions on perception.
Data availability
The fMRI dataset, experimental stimuli, and analysis code are publicly available. The fMRI dataset is available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3366301). The software used for the presentation of retinotopic mapping stimuli, and for the corresponding analysis, is available on github (https://github.com/ingo-m/pyprf). Example videos of the main experimental stimuli are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2583017). If you would like to reproduce the experimental stimuli, the respective PsychoPy code can be found on github (https://github.com/ingo-m/PacMan/tree/master/stimuli/experiment). The respective repository also contains the analysis code and a brief description how to reproduce the analysis (https://github.com/ingo-m/PacMan). High-level visualisations (e.g. cortical depth profiles & signal timecourses) and group-level statistical tests are implemented in a separate repository (https://github.com/ingo-m/py_depthsampling/tree/PacMan).
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Dataset: Feedback contribution to surface motion perception in the human early visual cortexZenodo, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3366301.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (452-11-002)
- Kâmil Uludağ
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (406-14-085)
- Ingo Marquardt
- Kâmil Uludağ
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Healthy participants gave informed consent before the experiment, and the study protocol was approved by the local ethics committee of the Faculty for Psychology & Neuroscience, Maastricht University. (reference number: ERCPN 180_03_06_2017 ).
Copyright
© 2020, Marquardt 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.
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Feedback contribution to surface motion perception in the human early visual cortex
eLife 9:e50933.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.50933
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