Beyond the classical receptive field: The effect of contextual stimuli

Abstract

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the RF concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lower-level RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure-ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feed-forward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis.

Bioplausible multiscale filtering in retino-cortical processing as a mechanism in perceptual grouping

“…It has been proven that neuronal response not only depends on local stimulus analysis within the classical RFs, but also from global feature integration as a contextual influence, in which it can extend over relatively large regions of the visual field [89]. This is another evidence for the Gestalt credo that a whole is not reducible to the sum of its parts [85]. 'Classical RFs increase in size from near foveal to peripheral location, from V1 to higher areas in the extrastriate cortex.…”

Deep convolutional models improve predictions of macaque V1 responses to natural images

“…In the case of divisive normalization, the main 345 challenge is learning the normalization pool. There is evidence for multiple 346 normalization pools, both tuned and untuned and operating in the receptive field center 347 and surround [54]. However, previous work investigating these normalization pools has 348 employed simple stimuli such as gratings [18] and we are not aware of any work learning 349 the entire normalization function from neural responses to natural stimuli.…”

Scrambling the skin: Simulated Skin Re-Arrangement Using Apparent Motion

“…Neural mechanisms supporting the proposed changes likely involve context-sensitive, long-range connections between neurons in sensory maps and feedback from higher-order motion neurons on neurons that encode local motion and position. Involvement of the long-range connections allows the context of stimulation to disambiguate local input [31]. Filling-in of blind spots in vision and deafferented skin areas (numb spots) relies on such connections [31,32] and blind spots are conceptually similar to our scrambled stimulus: both create discontinuities in the sensory input and both are 'glued' to a certain position on the receptor surface.…”

“…Involvement of the long-range connections allows the context of stimulation to disambiguate local input [31]. Filling-in of blind spots in vision and deafferented skin areas (numb spots) relies on such connections [31,32] and blind spots are conceptually similar to our scrambled stimulus: both create discontinuities in the sensory input and both are 'glued' to a certain position on the receptor surface.…”