title: Background changes delay the perceptual availability of form information.
abstract: In natural visual situations, unlike most psychophysical experiments, when a new stimulus appears in a portion of the visual field, the surrounding background changes simultaneously. In recordings from macaque V1, we found that a visual stimulus presented simultaneously with a background change evokes a response that is qualitatively different from the response to the same stimulus flashed on a static background. With the changing background, information about stimulus orientation and contrast is significantly delayed compared with the static-background situation. Our physiological results make several predictions that we test in the present paper with human psychophysical experiments. In a backward masking paradigm, a bar stimulus was either flashed onto a static background or presented simultaneously with a change in background luminance or pattern. Subjects discriminated bar orientation or detected that the scene changed before the mask. To achieve an equivalent contrast threshold for orientation discrimination, a longer stimulus-mask onset asynchrony (SOA) was needed in the changing than in the static-background condition; to match the orientation discrimination performance in the static and changing-background conditions at a fixed SOA, a higher bar contrast was needed when the background changed. Moreover, in the changing-background condition, a longer SOA was needed to discriminate bar orientation than to detect the scene change. These results suggest that orientation information is available more slowly when the background changes; orientation information is available earlier as stimulus contrast increases. The psychophysical findings are consistent with our physiological predictions. Compared with the common technique of flashing stimuli onto a static background, the changing-background paradigm may be more similar to natural vision in which saccades bring new stimuli and backgrounds into the visual field.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Seth
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Blau
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Paradiso
mesh_terms: D015350:Contrast Sensitivity / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011601:Psychophysics; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D013997:Time Factors; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology*