Neuronal correlates of motion‐defined shape perception in primate dorsal and ventral streams

Abstract

Human and non-human primates can readily perceive the shape of objects using visual motion. Classically, shape, and motion are considered to be separately processed via ventral and dorsal cortical pathways, respectively. However, many lines of anatomical and physiological evidence have indicated that these two pathways are likely to be interconnected at some stage. For motion-defined shape perception, these two pathways should interact with each other because the ventral pathway must utilize motion, which the dorsal pathway processes, to extract shape signal. However, it is unknown how interactions between cortical pathways are involved in neural mechanisms underlying motion-defined shape perception. We review evidence from psychophysical, lesion, neuroimaging and physiological research on motion-defined shape perception and then discuss the effects of behavioral demands on neural activity in ventral and dorsal cortical areas. Further, we discuss functions of two candidate sets of levels: early and higher-order cortical areas. The extrastriate area V4 and middle temporal (MT) area, which are reciprocally connected, at the early level are plausible areas for extracting the shape and/or constituent parts of shape from motion cues because neural dynamics are different from those during luminance-defined shape perception. On the other hand, among other higher-order visual areas, the anterior superior temporal sulcus likely contributes to the processing of cue-invariant shape recognition rather than cue-dependent shape processing. We suggest that sharing information about motion and shape between the early visual areas in the dorsal and ventral pathways is dependent on visual cues and behavioral requirements, indicating the interplay between the pathways.

Visual Neuropsychology in Development: Anatomo-Functional Brain Mechanisms of Action/Perception Binding in Health and Disease

“…It is involved in color perception, object recognition, and is sensitive to top-down attentional modulation (Roe et al, 2012). The fifth visual cortex (V5) receives input from V1, V2, V3, as well as from the thalamus (Ungerleider and Desimone, 1986;Felleman and Van Essen, 1991;Sincich et al, 2004;Warner et al, 2010) and projects to the superior temporal gyrus (Handa et al, 2017;Handa and Mikami, 2018), the frontal eye fields (Machner et al, 2010) and lateral intraparietal cortex (De Azevedo Neto and Amaro Junior, 2018). Some fibers reach V5 directly from the thalamus, bypassing V1 (Warner et al, 2012).…”

Serial dependencies between form orientation and motion direction are asymmetric

“…According to the physiological studies, these neurons can be located at the cortical areas MT/V5, MST, V3B/KO (see review: Kourtzi et al, 2008 ; Donato et al, 2020 ; experimental studies, e.g., Kourtzi and Kanwisher, 2000 ; Kourtzi et al, 2002 ; Kuai et al, 2020 ). However, there are some cortical areas, such as V1/V2 ( Krekelberg et al, 2005 ; Sincich and Horton, 2005 ; Lu et al, 2010 ; Wattam-Bell et al, 2010 ), V4 ( Ferrera and Maunsell, 2005 ; Tolias et al, 2005 ; Handa et al, 2010 , 2017 ; Handa and Mikami, 2018 ) that have small receptive fields and mainly process the local form and motion features. Therefore, the asymmetric serial dependencies between global form and motion displays in our current study do not imply asymmetric serial dependencies between local form and motion displays.…”

Voxel-Based Morphometric Features of Dysthyroid Optic Neuropathy

“…The cortical visual processing network includes dorsal and ventral pathways. The middle temporal gyrus is a key node in the dorsal pathway, which involves in visuospatial functions and visual motion [29][30][31] . The middle frontal gyrus and superior frontal gyrus take part in the oculomotor control, which is closely related to dorsal and ventral pathways.…”