title: Attention-dependent early cortical suppression contributes to crowding.
abstract: Crowding, the identification difficulty for a target in the presence of nearby flankers, is ubiquitous in spatial vision and is considered a bottleneck of object recognition and visual awareness. Despite its significance, the neural mechanisms of crowding are still unclear. Here, we performed event-related potential and fMRI experiments to measure the cortical interaction between the target and flankers in human subjects. We found that the magnitude of the crowding effect was closely associated with an early suppressive cortical interaction. The cortical suppression was reflected in the earliest event-related potential component (C1), which originated in V1, and in the BOLD signal in V1, but not other higher cortical areas. Intriguingly, spatial attention played a critical role in the manifestation of the suppression. These findings provide direct and converging evidence that attention-dependent V1 suppression contributes to crowding at a very early stage of visual processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education).
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education).
authors.forename: Yingchen
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education).
authors.forename: Ziyun
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Tiangang
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5697-796X
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education).
authors.forename: Yujia
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education).
authors.forename: Xilin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, and PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China, and ffang@pku.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Fang
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D016880:Anisotropy; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003441:Crowding; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D010100:Oxygen
keywords: attention; crowding; event-related potential; fMRI; primary visual cortex
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