Role of Feedforward and Feedback Projections in Figure-Ground Responses

Abstract

In the visual brain incoming sensory information is first decomposed into elementary features in low-level areas and then transferred to high-level areas. There the features are grouped into coherent perceptual representations. Recent findings, however, have established that stimulus evoked responses in the primary visual cortex are modulated by surrounding stimuli. The modulated responses depend on proper recurrent interactions between different, separate visual regions. These extra-classical receptive field responses combine local visual signals with more global information from the visual scene and often reflect relatively high-level perceptual attributes of the stimuli. One of the fundamental problems to be solved by the visual system is the segregation of figure from ground (see Figure 1). A key factor in the figure-ground process is the combination of local with global information. Therefore, contextual influences on neuronal activity have been interpreted as the neural substrate of figure-ground perception.