Attentional modulations of the early and later stages of the neural processing of visual completion.

ABSTRACT: The brain effortlessly recognizes objects even when the visual information belonging to an object is widely separated, as well demonstrated by the Kanizsa-type illusory contours (ICs), in which a contour is perceived despite the fragments of the contour being separated by gaps. Such large-range visual completion has long been thought to be preattentive, whereas its dependence on top-down influences remains unclear. Here, we report separate modulations by spatial attention and task relevance on the neural activities in response to the ICs. IC-sensitive event-related potentials that were localized to the lateral occipital cortex were modulated by spatial attention at an early processing stage (130-166 ms after stimulus onset) and modulated by task relevance at a later processing stage (234-2

SUBMITTER: Wu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4322362 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature