Configural specificity of the lateral occipital cortex.
Abstract
While regions of the lateral occipital cortex (LOC) are known to be selective for
objects relative to feature-matched controls, it is not known what set of cues or
configurations are used to promote this selectivity. Many theories of perceptual organization
have emphasized the figure-ground relationship as being especially important in object-level
processing. In the present work we studied the role of perceptual organization in
eliciting visual evoked potentials from the object selective LOC. To do this, we used
two-region stimuli in which the regions were modulated at different temporal frequencies
and were comprised of either symmetric or asymmetric arrangements. The asymmetric
arrangement produced an unambiguous figure-ground relationship consistent with a smaller
figure region surrounded by a larger background, while four different symmetric arrangements
resulted in ambiguous figure-ground relationships but still possessed strong kinetic
boundaries between the regions. The surrounded figure-ground arrangement evoked greater
activity in the LOC relative to first-tier visual areas (V1-V3). Response selectivity
in the LOC, however, was not present for the four different types of symmetric stimuli.
These results suggest that kinetic texture boundaries alone are not sufficient to
trigger selective processing in the LOC, but that the spatial configuration of a figure
that is surrounded by a larger background is both necessary and sufficient to selectively
activate the LOC.
Type
Journal articleSubject
AdultCues
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials, Visual
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Occipital Lobe
Photic Stimulation
Visual Cortex
Visual Perception
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13536Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.07.016Publication Info
Ales, JM; Appelbaum, Lawrence Gregory; Cottereau, Benoit R; & Norcia, AM (2010). Configural specificity of the lateral occipital cortex. Neuropsychologia, 48(11). pp. 3323-3328. 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.07.016. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13536.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Lawrence Gregory Appelbaum
Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Greg Appelbaum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences in the Duke University School of Medicine. He is a member of the Brain Stimulation
Division of Psychiatry, where he directs the Human Performance Optimization lab (Opti
Lab) and the Brain Stimulation Research Center. Dr. Appelbaum cor

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