Dynamic binding of visual features by neuronal/stimulus synchrony.
When people see a visual scene, certain parts of the visual scene are treated as belonging together and we regard them as a perceptual unit, which is called a "figure". People focus on figures, and the remaining parts of the scene are disregarded as "ground". In Gestalt psychology this process is called "figure-ground segregation". According to current perceptual psychology, a figure is formed by binding various visual features in a scene, and developments in neuroscience have revealed that there are many feature-encoding neurons, which respond to such features specifically. It is not known, however, how the brain binds different features of an object into a coherent visual object representation. Recently, the theory of binding by neuronal synchrony, which argues that feature binding is dynamically mediated by neuronal synchrony of feature-encoding neurons, has been proposed. This review article portrays the problem of figure-ground segregation and features binding, summarizes neurophysiological and psychophysical experiments and theory relevant to feature binding by neuronal/stimulus synchrony, and suggests possible directions for future research on this topic.
Iwabuchi
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Faculty of Arts, Shinshu University.
D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception