NEURAL VISUAL CODING: IMAGE TO OBJECT REPRESENTATION

描述（改编自申请人摘要）：本提案将 继续对视觉过程进行神经生理学研究， 图像的表示到物体的表示。基于概念 在感受野中，视觉皮层的第一阶段通常具有 被解释为局部图像特征的表示， 增加细节和增加对周围环境的敏感性， 感受野，但仍然基于局部邻域操作。PI的 实验室发现，V1、V2和V4区的神经元对 与相同的局部对比度边界不同，这取决于边界是否 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和过程， 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 视觉的计算理论，我们需要（1）理解 在这些皮层水平上的对象相关特征表征，以及（2） 理解对象相关的特征编码与高级过程的关系 比如自上而下的注意力选择。拟议的实验将探索 V1、V2和V4中的对象相关特征编码，具有各种边界范例 所有权和感知完成，他们将决定如何编码 被动观看和主动视觉选择条件之间的变化 在形状辨别任务中。结果将区分两个 假设：（a）较低皮层水平的对象相关信号是 注意过程的副产品，以及（B）对象相关特征 表示来自独立的过程，这些过程可以被 有效选择视觉信息的注意力机制。

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.