How recent experience affects the perception of ambiguous objects

Daelli, Valentina; Rijsbergen, Nicola van; Treves, Alessandro

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2010.01.060

Cited by 32 publications

(34 citation statements)

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“…If pre-exposure effects indeed result from a carryover of neuronal adaptation during the pre-exposure, one would expect an influence of the time interval between pre-exposure and subsequent rivalry, because neurons may recover from adaptation when they are not driven. Such an influence has indeed been found for binocular rivalry [12,13], ambiguous motion [11] and more complex naturalistic 'morph' stimuli [15]. If the interval between pre-exposure and rivalry stimuli gets too long, neither suppressive nor facilitative effects are observed.…”

Section: Temporal Contextmentioning

confidence: 88%

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

Klink

Wezel

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Ambiguous visual stimuli provide the brain with sensory information that contains conflicting evidence for multiple mutually exclusive interpretations. Two distinct aspects of the phenomenological experience associated with viewing ambiguous visual stimuli are the apparent stability of perception whenever one perceptual interpretation is dominant, and the instability of perception that causes perceptual dominance to alternate between perceptual interpretations upon extended viewing. This review summarizes several ways in which contextual information can help the brain resolve visual ambiguities and construct temporarily stable perceptual experiences. Temporal context through prior stimulation or internal brain states brought about by feedback from higher cortical processing levels may alter the response characteristics of specific neurons involved in rivalry resolution. Furthermore, spatial or crossmodal context may strengthen the neuronal representation of one of the possible perceptual interpretations and consequently bias the rivalry process towards it. We suggest that contextual influences on perceptual choices with ambiguous visual stimuli can be highly informative about the neuronal mechanisms of context-driven inference in the general processes of perceptual decision-making.

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Section: Temporal Contextmentioning

confidence: 88%

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

Klink

Wezel

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…However, the fact that augmentation has been observed mainly at high-level areas suggests that PS might be confined to higher level of motion processing and thus being more susceptible to attentional and expectation influences (Seidemann and Newsome 1999;Maunsell 1996, 1999;Rees et al 1997;Haug et al 1998;Buchel et al 1998;Huk et al 2001). Indeed, Daelli et al (2010) reported a similar effect using complex objects as stimuli. In particular, when adapting to complex objects and testing with morphs (ambiguous stimuli), they found a switch from adaptation to a priming effect as the temporal delay between a prototype and an ambiguous test stimulus was increased (i.e., up to 3 s).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Since the neural mechanisms underlying PS and its interaction with attentional processes and expectations are still not clear, in the present study we focused on the early components of neural dynamics (i.e., facilitation and suppression) (Nelson 1991;Finlayson and Cynader 1995;Castro-Alamancos and Connors 1996;Varela et al 1997Varela et al , 1999Chance et al 1998;Lisberger and Movshon 1999;Hempel et al 2000;Boudreau and Ferster 2005;Glasser et al 2011). Additionally, there is psychophysical evidence that PS appears following brief adaptation to ambiguous complex stimuli (Daelli et al 2010) and to directionally ambiguous patterns (Kanai and Verstraten, 2005;Pavan et al 2010), for which a motion energy detector cannot produce any response. Hempel et al (2000) suggested that brief periods of synaptic activity may be able to transiently shift a set of interconnected cortical neurons into a state in which recurrent excitation is sufficiently strong to support persistent activity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…One intriguing possibility is that such neural dynamics could potentially provide the neural mechanism for attractor networks, considered to play an important role in a variety of visual and high-level cognitive functions (e.g., visual short-term memory, working memory, associative memory, spatial orientation; Amit 1989; Daelli and Treves 2010). For example, Daelli and Treves (2010) reported that an attractor network model can account for short-term priming and adaptation effects. In an attractor network model the strength of the associations between attractors can determine a transition between the activity elicited by the prime and the neural response to the target.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modelling fast forms of visual neural plasticity using a modified second-order motion energy model

2014

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The Adelson-Bergen motion energy sensor is well established as the leading model of low-level visual motion sensing in human vision. However, the standard model cannot predict adaptation effects in motion perception. A previous paper presented an extension to the model which uses a first-order RC gain-control circuit (leaky integrator) to implement adaptation effects which can span many seconds, and showed that the extended model's output is consistent with psychophysical data on the classic motion after-effect. Recent psychophysical research has reported adaptation over much shorter time periods, spanning just a few hundred milliseconds. The present paper further extends the sensor model to implement rapid adaptation, by adding a secondorder RC circuit which causes the sensor to require a finite amount of time to react to a sudden change in stimulation. The output of the new sensor accounts accurately for psychophysical data on rapid forms of facilitation (rapid visual motion priming, rVMP) and suppression (rapid motion after-effect, rMAE). Changes in natural scene content occur over multiple time scales, and multistage leaky integrators of the kind proposed here offer a computational scheme for modelling adaptation over multiple time scales.

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“…'High-level' aftereffects are by no means unique to faces; they also reportedly occur between distorted images of the same object (Dennett, Edwards, & McKone, 2012;Maclin & Webster, 2001); along morph continua involving arbitrary objects (Daelli, van Rijsbergen, & Treves, 2010), novel objects (Daelli, 2011), and human bodies (Rhodes, Jeffery, Boeing, & Calder, 2013); between objects with different surface material properties (Motoyoshi, 2012) or rendered with different levels of photorealism (Seyama & Nagayama, 2010); and between photographs of landscapes varying along dimensions such as ruralness vs urbanness (Greene & Oliva, 2010).…”

Section: Adaptation To Faces and Other Complex Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Norms are Not the Norm: Testing Theories of Sensory Encoding Using Visual Aftereffects

Storrs¹

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A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in 2015School of Psychology A B S T R A C TThe goal of visual neuroscience is to explain how patterns of neural activity give rise to visual experiences. Here I use visual aftereffects to explore the computational principles underlying the perception of simple, intermediate, and complex forms (orientations, shapes, and faces). Aftereffects occur when exposure to one stimulus changes the appearance of a subsequent stimulus. In the tilt aftereffect, for example, staring at a left-tilted line can make a vertical line seem briefly to lean to the right. Aftereffects are thought to be caused by neural adaptation -changes in the responsiveness of neurons after prolonged stimulation.Visual aftereffects allow us to probe sensory encoding, because adaptation within different encoding schemes can predict different patterns of perceptual aftereffect. I focus on two theories of encoding prominent in the face recognition literature. According to norm-based accounts, faces are represented in terms of how they deviate from a unique norm, such as the average of all experienced faces. Similar proposals have been raised in other contexts, for example to encode the aspect ratio of shapes. Norm-based encoding can be implemented by a population in which neurons respond increasingly as a stimulus moves further in the neuron's preferred direction, away from a normative value in stimulus space. Alternatively, exemplar-based accounts propose that faces are encoded in terms of their similarity to a number of previously-experienced exemplars. Exemplar-based encoding can be implemented by a population of non-monotonically tuned neurons that prefer particular points in stimulus space, rather than directions.Norm-based and exemplar-based accounts make distinct predictions for the pattern of aftereffects one should experience following adaptation. Norm-based encoding is associated with renormalisation, in which the adapting stimulus appears more 'neutral' or 'average' after prolonged viewing, and the appearances of other stimuli are altered in the same fashion (e.g. after adapting to a male face, all faces should look more feminine).Exemplar-based encoding is associated with 'local repulsion,' in which the adapting stimulus appears unchanged, but differences between it and subsequent stimuli are exaggerated (e.g. after adapting to a male face, a very masculine face should look even more masculine, while an androgynous or female face should look more feminine).Over the past fifteen years, norm-based theories of shape and face encoding have gained traction, ostensibly supported by evidence from aftereffects. In Chapter 1, I review this evidence, and relate it to an older debate concerning the role of norms in orientation perception. I conclude that the evidence for renormalisation in form perception is under-2 3 whelming. In Chapter 2 I empirically address the most recent evidence for orientation renormalisation. I show that these data likely arise from an ...

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How recent experience affects the perception of ambiguous objects

Cited by 32 publications

References 65 publications

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

Modelling fast forms of visual neural plasticity using a modified second-order motion energy model

Norms are Not the Norm: Testing Theories of Sensory Encoding Using Visual Aftereffects

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