Studies in Cognition: The Problems Solved and Created by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The Time Course of Visual Processing: From Early Perception to Decision-Making
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
A Limit to the Speed of Processing in Ultra-Rapid Visual Categorization of Novel Natural Scenes
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Enhanced human behavior recognition using HMM and evaluative rectification
Proceedings of the first ACM international workshop on Analysis and retrieval of tracked events and motion in imagery streams
Tms to the lateral occipital cortex disrupts object processing but facilitates scene processing
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The time course of visual letter perception
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Present theories of visual recognition emphasize the role of interactive processing across populations of neurons within a given network, but the nature of these interactions remains unresolved. In particular, data describing the sufficiency of feedforward algorithms for conscious vision and studies revealing the functional relevance of feedback connections to the striate cortex seem to offer contradictory accounts of visual information processing. TMS is a good method to experimentally address this issue, given its excellent temporal resolution and its capacity to establish causal relations between brain function and behavior. We studied 20 healthy volunteers in a visual recognition task. Subjects were briefly presented with images of animals (birds or mammals) in natural scenes and were asked to indicate the animal category. MRI-guided stereotaxic single TMS pulses were used to transiently disrupt striate cortex function at different times after image onset (SOA). Visual recognition was significantly impaired when TMS was applied over the occipital pole at SOAs of 100 and 220 msec. The first interval has consistently been described in previous TMS studies and is explained as the interruption of the feedforward volley of activity. Given the late latency and discrete nature of the second peak, we hypothesize that it represents the disruption of a feedback projection to V1, probably from other areas in the visual network. These results provide causal evidence for the necessity of recurrent interactive processing, through feedforward and feedback connections, in visual recognition of natural complex images.