Electrophysiological Priming Effects Demonstrate Independence and Overlap of Visual Regularity Representations in the Extrastriate Cortex

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2021 Jul 9

PMID 34242360

Citations 2

Authors

Alexis D J Makin

John Tyson-Carr

Yiovanna Derpsch

Giulia Rampone

Marco Bertamini

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

An Event Related Potential (ERP) component called the Sustained Posterior Negativity (SPN) is generated by regular visual patterns (e.g. vertical reflectional symmetry, horizontal reflectional symmetry or rotational symmetry). Behavioural studies suggest symmetry becomes increasingly salient when the exemplars update rapidly. In line with this, Experiment 1 (N = 48) found that SPN amplitude increased when three different reflectional symmetry patterns were presented sequentially. We call this effect 'SPN priming'. We then exploited SPN priming to investigate independence of different symmetry representations. SPN priming did not survive changes in retinal location (Experiment 2, N = 48) or non-orthogonal changes in axis orientation (Experiment 3, N = 48). However, SPN priming transferred between vertical and horizontal axis orientations (Experiment 4, N = 48) and between reflectional and rotational symmetry (Experiment 5, N = 48). SPN priming is interesting in itself, and a useful new method for identifying functional boundaries of the symmetry response. We conclude that visual regularities at different retinal locations are coded independently. However, there is some overlap between different regularities presented at the same retinal location.

Citing Articles

The interaction between luminance polarity grouping and symmetry axes on the ERP responses to symmetry.

Dering B, Wright D, Gheorghiu E Vis Neurosci. 2024; 41():E005.

PMID: 39676578 PMC: 11730996. DOI: 10.1017/S0952523824000075.

The brain does not process horizontal reflection when attending to vertical reflection, and vice versa.

Makin A, Rampone G, Bertamini M J Vis. 2024; 24(3):1.

PMID: 38427362 PMC: 10913937. DOI: 10.1167/jov.24.3.1.

Electrophysiological evidence of the amodal representation of symmetry in extrastriate areas.

Rampone G, Adam M, Makin A, Tyson-Carr J, Bertamini M Sci Rep. 2022; 12(1):1180.

PMID: 35064121 PMC: 8783022. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-04501-3.

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