title: Temporally unfolding neural representation of pictorial occlusion.
abstract: The human visual system possesses a remarkable ability to reconstruct the shape of an object that is partly occluded by an interposed surface. Behavioral results suggest that, under some circumstances, this perceptual process (termed amodal completion) progresses from an initial representation of local image features to a completed representation of a shape that may include features that are not explicitly present in the retinal image. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that the completed surface is represented in early visual cortical areas. We used fMRI adaptation, combined with brief, masked exposures, to track the amodal completion process as it unfolds in early visual cortical regions. We report evidence for an evolution of the neural representation from the image-based feature representation to the completed representation. Our method offers the possibility of measuring changes in cortical activity using fMRI over a time scale of a few hundred milliseconds.
authors.affiliation: User Interface Design Center, Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA. robert.rauschenberger@siemens.com
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rauschenberger
authors.forename: Taosheng
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Scott D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Slotnick
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yantis
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception