NEURAL VISUAL CODING: IMAGE TO OBJECT REPRESENTATION

描述(改编自申请人的摘要)：本建议书将 继续对视觉过程进行神经生理学研究，从 从图像表示到对象表示。基于这一概念 在感受野中，视觉皮质的第一阶段通常 被解释为本地图像特征的表示，具有渐进性 增加了细节，并对围绕 可接受的领域，但仍以当地社区运作为基础。少年派的 实验室发现，V1、V2和V4区的神经元 不同于相同的局部对比边框，取决于边框是否 属于边界一侧或另一侧的人物(边界所有权 编码)，指示与对象相关的特征表示，并处理 需要全局表单处理。这些发现挑战了传统的 概念。为了从心理学和心理学的角度解释新的发现 计算视觉理论，我们需要(1)理解视觉的本质 在这些皮层水平上的与对象相关的特征表示，以及(2) 了解与对象相关的功能编码如何与高级流程相关 例如自上而下的注意选择。拟议中的实验将探索 V1、V2和V4中具有各种边界范例的对象相关要素编码 所有权和知觉完成，它们将决定这种编码方式 被动观看和主动视觉选择的条件之间的变化 在形状辨别任务中。结果将区分两个 假设：(A)在较低的皮质水平上与物体相关的信号是 注意过程的副产品，以及(B)与物体有关的特征 表示由独立的进程产生，这些进程可能由 有效选择视觉信息的注意机制。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted From The Applicant's Abstract): This proposal will continue neurophysiological studies on the visual processes that lead from representations of images to representations of objects. Based on the concept of the receptive field, the first stages of the visual cortex have generally been interpreted as representations of local image features, with progressive addition of details and increasing sensitivity to the context around the receptive field, but still based on local neighborhood operations. The PI's laboratory has discovered that neurons of areas V1, V2 and V4 respond differently to the same local contrast border depending on whether the border belongs to a figure on one or the other side of the border (border ownership coding), indicating an object-related feature representation and processes that require global form processing. These findings challenge the traditional concept. In order to interpret the new findings in terms of psychological and computational theories of vision, we need (1) to understand the nature of object-related feature representation at those cortical levels, and (2) to understand how object-related feature coding relates to high-level processes such as top-down attentional selection. The proposed experiments will explore object-related feature coding in V1, V2 and V4 with various paradigms of border ownership and perceptual completion and they will determine how this coding changes between the conditions of passive viewing and active visual selection in a shape discrimination task. The results will distinguish between two hypotheses: (a) that object-related signals at lower cortical levels are the byproduct of attention processes, and (b) that object-related feature representations result from independent processes which may be used by attentional mechanisms to select visual information efficiently.