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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Alexander Thiele
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Natural visual scenes are cluttered with multiple objects whose individual features must somehow be selectively linked (or 'bound') if perception is to coincide with reality. Recent neurophysiological evidence(1,2) supports a 'binding-by-synchrony' hypothesis3 : neurons excited by features of the same object fire synchronously, while neurons excited by features of different objects do not. Moving plaid patterns offer a straightforward means to test this idea. By appropriate manipulations of apparent transparency, the component gratings of a plaid pattern can be seen as parts of a single coherently moving surface or as two non-coherently moving surfaces. We examined directional tuning and synchrony of area-MT neurons in awake, fixating primates in response to perceptually coherent and non-coherent plaid patterns. Here we show that directional tuning correlated highly with perceptual coherence, which is consistent with an earlier study(4). Although we found stimulus-dependent synchrony, coherent plaids elicited significantly less synchrony than did non-coherent plaids. Our data therefore do not support the binding-by-synchrony hypothesis as applied to this class of motion stimuli in area MT.
Author(s): Thiele A; Stoner G
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature
Year: 2003
Volume: 421
Issue: 6921
Pages: 366-370
ISSN (print): 0028-0836
ISSN (electronic): 1476-4687
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature01285
DOI: 10.1038/nature01285
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