Scene complexity modulates degree of feedback activity during object detection in natural scenes.

ABSTRACT: Selective brain responses to objects arise within a few hundreds of milliseconds of neural processing, suggesting that visual object recognition is mediated by rapid feed-forward activations. Yet disruption of neural responses in early visual cortex beyond feed-forward processing stages affects object recognition performance. Here, we unite these discrepant findings by reporting that object recognition involves enhanced feedback activity (recurrent processing within early visual cortex) when target objects are embedded in natural scenes that are characterized by high complexity. Human participants performed an animal target detection task on natural scenes with low, medium or high complexity as determined by a computational model of low-level contrast statistics. Three converging lines of

SUBMITTER: Groen IIA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6329519 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature