TY - JOUR
T1 - Short-Term Memory for Figure-Ground Organization in the Visual Cortex
AU - O'Herron, Philip
AU - von der Heydt, Rüdiger
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NIH grants EY02966 and EY016281, and by a stipend to P.O. from NIH Training Grant EY07143. We wish to thank Ofelia Garalde and Fangtu Qiu for technical assistance and Anne Martin, Stefan Mihalas, and Nan Zhang for valuable discussions.
PY - 2009/3/12
Y1 - 2009/3/12
N2 - Whether the visual system uses a buffer to store image information and the duration of that storage have been debated intensely in recent psychophysical studies. The long phases of stable perception of reversible figures suggest a memory that persists for seconds. But persistence of similar duration has not been found in signals of the visual cortex. Here, we show that figure-ground signals in the visual cortex can persist for a second or more after the removal of the figure-ground cues. When new figure-ground information is presented, the signals adjust rapidly, but when a figure display is changed to an ambiguous edge display, the signals decay slowly-a behavior that is characteristic of memory devices. Figure-ground signals represent the layout of objects in a scene, and we propose that a short-term memory for object layout is important in providing continuity of perception in the rapid stream of images flooding our eyes.
AB - Whether the visual system uses a buffer to store image information and the duration of that storage have been debated intensely in recent psychophysical studies. The long phases of stable perception of reversible figures suggest a memory that persists for seconds. But persistence of similar duration has not been found in signals of the visual cortex. Here, we show that figure-ground signals in the visual cortex can persist for a second or more after the removal of the figure-ground cues. When new figure-ground information is presented, the signals adjust rapidly, but when a figure display is changed to an ambiguous edge display, the signals decay slowly-a behavior that is characteristic of memory devices. Figure-ground signals represent the layout of objects in a scene, and we propose that a short-term memory for object layout is important in providing continuity of perception in the rapid stream of images flooding our eyes.
KW - SYSNEURO
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U2 - 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.01.014
DO - 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.01.014
M3 - Article
C2 - 19285475
AN - SCOPUS:61549111595
SN - 0896-6273
VL - 61
SP - 801
EP - 809
JO - Neuron
JF - Neuron
IS - 5
ER -